App Store No. 1; Nvidia loses $600B in a day

January 27, 2025: DeepSeek's app overtook ChatGPT to top the U.S. App Store free chart. The same day, Nvidia's stock plunged — about $600 billion in market cap erased, the largest single-day drop for a single U.S. company in history. Investors began re-pricing the 'compute-pile = winning' AI arms-race narrative.

DeepSeek's official app overtook ChatGPT to top the U.S. App Store free chart, prompting global attention. The same day, Nvidia's stock plunged, wiping out roughly $600 billion in market cap — the largest single-company single-day drop in U.S. market history. Investors began re-pricing the “only piles of compute can win” AI arms-race narrative. Marc Andreessen called R1 “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world.” In a few short days, DeepSeek went from a tech-circle secret to global front-page news. Meanwhile, the company's engineers were quietly uploading new model quantizations on Twitter.