LONDON (Reuters) - Technology shares around the world slid on Monday as a surge in popularity of a Chinese discount artificial intelligence model shook investors' faith in the AI sector's voracious demand for high-tech chips.

Startup DeepSeek has rolled out a free assistant it says uses lower-cost chips and less data, seemingly challenging a widespread bet in financial markets that AI will drive demand along a supply chain from chipmakers to data centres.

MARKET REACTION:

Nasdaq futures fell over 3%, S&P 500 futures tumbled nearly 2%.

Dominant AI chipmaker Nvidia's ( NVDA ) 8.4% slide led declines among heavyweight megacap stocks in premarket trading, with Microsoft off by 4%, Meta Platforms ( META ) down 3.7% and Alphabet shedding 3.1%.

European tech stocks slid over 5%, set for their worst day since October. Chip maker ASML fell 9.4%, and Siemens Energy, which provides electric hardware for AI infrastructure, slid around 20% at one point from a record high on Friday.

Japan's Nikkei shed nearly 1%, weighed by heavyweight tech names. AI-focused startup investor SoftBank Group fell over 8%.

COMMENTS:

JON WITHAAR, SENIOR PORTFOLIO MANAGER, PICTET ASSET MANAGEMENT, SINGAPORE:

"We still don't know the details and nothing has been 100% confirmed in regards to the claims, but if there truly has been a breakthrough in the cost to train models from $100 million+ to this alleged $6 million number this is actually very positive for productivity and AI end users as cost is obviously much lower meaning lower cost of access."

"Is it negative for Nvidia ( NVDA ) in the short term? Yes, as expectations are sky high on Blackwell (chips)and positioning is long in anything AI supply chain related, but ultimately anything that makes AI cheaper to implement is positive for those selling AI related products and applications and using AI related tools - an ever growing group."

"But let's see the devil is in the detail and as you can imagine a Chinese model will be controversial for many uses. Still it is a cold shower and a dose of reality for a sector that probably needed it."

DANIEL TAN, PORTFOLIO MANAGER, GRASSHOPPER ASSET MANAGEMENT, SINGAPORE:

"The selloff in Japan and U.S. tech names should not be a surprise given high valuations based on P/E and P/B ratios. With the current rate of P/E priced for some U.S. and Japan tech names, the market is expecting future earnings to continue to justify the high prices of these tech names. That is definitely a high expectation to meet."

"However, DeepSeek has shown over the weekend with its updated AI model that is cost-effective with OpenAI's technology while running on reduced-capability chips, raising questions over the dominance of U.S. tech firms such as Nvidia Corp. ( NVDA )"

RICHARD CLODE, TECH PORTFOLIO MANAGER, JANUS HENDERSON INVESTORS, LONDON:

"DeepSeek appears to bringing some genuine innovation to the architecture of general purpose and reasoning models. Given compute restrictions in China it is not surprising that necessity drives innovation as we saw in Russia in the 1990s when limited access to PCs drove coding creativity and a generation of novel Russian coders."

"As Yann LeCun (Meta's chief AI scientist) has noted, this is a victory for the open source model of driving community innovation with DeepSeek leveraging Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen open source models."

"However, DeepSeek is leveraging distillation techniques that are reliant on the work of others. How reliant is a key question the market is grappling with currently. Ultimately, we think that creates more questions around the direct monetisation of LLMs (large language models)and open source models than it does about AI capex. This announcement will also draw more scrutiny from the US around chip restrictions as well as the proliferation open source AI models."

ALEXANDR WANG, CEO SCALE AI, (TWITTER POST)

"DeepSeek is a wake up call for America, but it doesn't change the strategy:

- USA must out-innovate & race faster, as we have done in the entire history of AI

- Tighten export controls on chips so that we can maintain future leads

Every major breakthrough in AI has been American."

GEORGE LAGARIAS, INVESTMENT STRATEGIST, FORVIS MAZARS, LONDON:

"China and DeepSeek say, at the very least, that they can deliver what ChatGPT can deliver today at a fraction of the cost," said George Lagarias, investment strategist at Forvis Mazars.

"It makes sense that markets question the narrative that has been underpinning the whole market ... It's a very frothy market so it doesn't really take that much for investors to take some profit."

BEN BARRINGER, TECHNOLOGY ANALYST, QUILTER CHEVIOT, LONDON:

"DeepSeek's success will serve to intensify the US/China AI war, particularly following the recent announcement of the Stargate project in the U.S."

"It also provides a wake up call and somewhat of a question mark on how much needs to be spent in order to build a model, and whether quite the level of CapEx we have been seeing is really required."

"However, bringing the price of model training down is no bad thing as it will help to lower the entry point and this price elasticity could help drive usage and volume."