Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index lost nearly 2.7 percent in early trading, with chipmaker Nvidia down nearly 12 percent.

DeepSeek's new AI model has sparked concerns about Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware market, causing a drop in the chipmaker's stock and raising questions about the future of high-performance AI chips.