The emergence of a competitor to American artificial intelligence giants has rattled investors, and sent shares in Nvidia sinking 17 per cent overnight.

Musk acquired X (then Twitter) in October 2022 after a highly publicized back and forth, in which he gave up on the acquisition midway but ultimately closed the deal, paying $44 billion for the platform. X's user base has been on a decline since the acquisition, and advertising revenues have plummeted.

He told CNBC: "My understanding is that Deepseek has about 50,000 H100s, which they can't talk about obviously because it is against the export controls that the U.S. has put in p