Japanese tech firms sank Tuesday after a sell-off in US titans following news of China's DeepSeek chatbot, while the dollar rallied on a report saying Washington was considering universal tariffs on a range of goods.

The Japanese yen and the Swiss franc gained while the U.S. dollar fell against major currencies on Monday amid a selloff in technology stocks as markets weighed the implications of a Chinese startup launching a free open-source artificial intelligence model.

TOKYO: Japanese tech stocks fell sharply for a second day running on Tuesday (Jan 28) following a plunge in US tech stocks driven by the emergence of a

The Japanese yen declined from its safe-haven gains as investors reacted to a Chinese startup's new open-source AI model and fresh U.S. tariff threats. The U.S. dollar steadied, while the euro weakened ahead of an expected ECB rate cut amid Trump's tariff plans on various imports.

Shares in Nvidia, whose semiconductors power the AI industry, fell nearly 17 percent on Wall Street, erasing nearly $600 billion of its market value.

Nvidia's US$589 billion loss in stock market value is the deepest ever one-day loss for a company on Wall Street, according to LSEG data. It was more than double the previous one-day record loss, set by Nvidia last September. The tech-rich Nasdaq index finished down more than three per cent.

DeepSeek topped the Apple App Store chart and sparked fears the Chinese company was quickly catching up with OpenAI's ChatGPT while costing far less.

The same tech companies that have benefitted from the AI frenzy in the past year were getting pummeled before markets even officially opened on Monday.

Advantest shares have been rising in tandem with Nvidia’s. The correlation coefficient between Advantest and Nvidia over the past three years was 0.93, compared to Teradyne’s 0.62 and Tokyo Electron’s 0.72.

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981. It has invested millions in some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies.

--Up 10.98% from its 52-week low of 140.613 hit Monday, Sept. 16, 2024 Investor appetite for AI showed no sign of slowing, as Nvidia, Arm, Oracle, and more climbed on Wednesday.

Masayoshi Son, the Japanese tycoon helming US President Donald Trump's big new AI push, is the son of an immigrant pig farmer with a spectacular but also sketchy investment record. The aim is to build infrastructure to develop AI with an initial $100 billion and reaching $500 billion during Trump's second term,