A bitcoin is on a screen showing the bitcoin-U.S. dollar exchange rate.
Fernando Gutierrez-Juarez | picture alliance | Getty Images
Cryptocurrencies tumbled to begin the final week of January, with the market in a cooling period after running to a new record and pulled lower by the DeepSeek-driven sell-off in tech stocks.
The price of bitcoin fell 3% to $100,776.81, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it fell as low as $97,750.00. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped 7%.
Shares of Coinbase and MicroStrategy fell about 2% each in premarket trading. Bitcoin miners that power AI ventures suffered deeper cuts. Core Scientific slid 21%, while Terawulf lost 16%. Iren, formerly known as Iris Energy, fell 16%.
Crypto was under pressure from a rout in tech stocks. Chinese startup DeepSeek said it may have created a competitive artificial intelligence model for a fraction of the cost, sparking concerns about U.S. dominance in AI and big tech’s spending on AI models and data centers.
“Today’s 3% decline in Nasdaq futures (on DeepSeek news), so far, has driven Digital Asset liquidation overnight,” Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick said in a note Monday. “This relationship highlights the continued strong (and strengthening) relationship between digital assets and the tech sector. [Bitcoin] remains strongly correlated to Nasdaq, much more so than it does to gold.”
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Bitcoin falls under $100,000, dragged by DeepSeek stock sell-off
Bitcoin has seen more than $250 million in long liquidations over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, as traders who used leverage to bet the price of bitcoin would continue to rise were forced to sell their assets to cover their losses.
The selling follows a mixed response by the market to President Donald Trump’s widely anticipated executive order on crypto, issued Thursday afternoon, and a lack of news since. Some crypto traders were disappointed the order didn’t fully commit to the establishment of a stockpile, and some didn’t care for the “stockpile” language versus a reserve. (While the latter would involve actively buying bitcoin in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the bitcoin currently held by the U.S. government.) Bitcoin hit a new record above $109,000 last week in anticipation of the executive order.
“Ultimately this set up digital assets to be more at risk of a sharp sell-off whether the driver of the sell-off came from digital assets or not (in this case Nasdaq),” Kendrick said of the market’s initial reaction to the order. “Nevertheless, at least the Trump administration news is out there, so the disappointment/confusion and therefore ‘hope phase’ is over.”
Investors may also be derisking ahead of this week’s Federal Reserve meeting, which is scheduled to conclude Wednesday.
“Investors are hoping the Fed will lean more to the accommodative side but are fearful the Fed won’t be as dovish as what the market would like to see,” said Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX. “The most important takeaway right now is to see the forest through the trees. When we look at the bitcoin chart, there is nothing bearish about the price action.”
—CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed reporting.
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Qorvo logo of a US semiconductor company is seen displayed on a smartphone and pc screen.
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Shares of semiconductor supplier Qorvo, which counts on Apple for an outsized amount of revenue, plunged in extended trading after the company warned of potentially flat sales to its “largest customer.”
Qorvo’s stock initially popped after the company reported better-than-expected fiscal third quarter earnings. Here’s how the company did compared with analysts’ expectations based on a survey by LSEG:
Earnings per share: $1.61, adjusted, vs. $1.20 expected
Revenue: $916 million vs. $902 million expected
Qorvo, which makes radio frequency chips used by smartphone manufacturers, offered better-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, saying it expects revenue to come in at $850 million, ahead of the $841 million forecast by analysts. The company expects earnings of $1 per share, versus the 86 cents projected.
However, the stock turned around dramatically soon after the start of the earnings calls, when CEO Bob Bruggeworth told analysts that sales to its top customer would show little if any growth in the fiscal year ending March 2026.
“For FY 2026, we’re currently forecasting revenue at our largest customer to be flat to up modestly,” Bruggeworth said.
The stock was down 3.4% after the call.
Qorvo doesn’t name the customer in its earnings report but the company said in its annual filing last year that Apple accounted for 46% of revenue in fiscal 2024. On the call, Qorvo said its largest customer represented just over half of revenue in the December quarter.
Analysts expect total revenue for fiscal 2026 of $3.85 billion, representing growth of just over 4% from a year earlier, according to LSEG.
Bruggeworth said the company also faces challenges with its Android business. Revenue there will fall by about $150 million to $200 million in fiscal 2026 and by about the same amount the following year.
“Most of that will be in China,” he said.
Earlier this month, activist investor Starboard Value revealed a 7.7% stake in Qorvo.
Google‘s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, CNBC has learned.
The new classification for the U.S. came after President Donald Trump said his administration would make name changes on official maps and federal communications. Those changes include renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and renaming Mount Denali as Mount McKinley.
Google’s order to stop designating the U.S. as a “non-sensitive” country came on Monday, according to internal correspondence viewed by CNBC. That’s when the company announced it would change the name of the body of water between the Yucatan and Florida peninsulas to the “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.”
The decision to elevate the U.S. to its list of sensitive countries illustrates the challenges that tech companies face as they try to navigate the early days of a second Trump presidency. Since the start of the year, Meta, TikTok, Amazon and others have adjusted their products and policies to reflect Trump’s political views, policies and executive orders.
Trump had a rocky relationship with Silicon Valley throughout his first presidency and didn’t shy away from criticizing the sector throughout his 2024 campaign. More recently, tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have pursued closer ties with Trump, with several standing behind the president during his inauguration.
Google’s list of sensitive countries includes China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, among others. The label is also used for countries that have “unique geometry or unique labeling,” according to internal correspondence reviewed by CNBC.
The U.S. and Mexico are new additions.
The “sensitive” classification is a technical configuration that signifies some labels within a given country are different from other countries, a company spokesperson told CNBC.
It’s unclear if Google’s reclassification of the U.S. extends beyond its “Geo” division.
In this photo illustration, the Gulf of Mexico is displayed on the Google Maps app on Jan. 28, 2025 in San Anselmo, California.
Some team members within the maps division were ordered to urgently make changes to the location name and recategorize the U.S. from “non-sensitive” to “sensitive,” according to the internal correspondence. The changes were given a rare “P0” order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified and instructed to drop what they were doing to work on it.
Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.
“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company said in an X post. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
Google added that the name Gulf of Mexico will remain displayed for users in Mexico. Users in other countries will see both names, the company said.
When the Obama administration changed the name of the Alaska mountain from Mount McKinley to Denali in August 2015, Google updated Maps to reflect the name change, a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
The U.S. Navy has instructed its members to avoid using artificial intelligence technology from China’s DeepSeek, CNBC has learned.
In a warning issued by email to “shipmates” on Friday, the Navy said DeepSeek’s AI was not to be used “in any capacity” due to “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy confirmed the authenticity of the email and said it was in reference to the Department of the Navy’s Chief Information Officer’s generative AI policy.
The announcement followed DeepSeek’s release of its powerful new reasoning AI model called R1, which rivals technology from OpenAI. The DeepSeek model is open source, meaning any AI developer can use it. The DeepSeek app has surged to the top of Apple’s App Store, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and people in the industry have praised its performance and reasoning capabilities.
DeepSeek’s pronouncements rocked the capital markets on Monday due to concerns that future AI products will require less-expensive infrastructure than Wall Street has assumed. DeepSeek said in late December that its large language model took only two months and less than $6 million to build despite the U.S. curbing chip exports to China three times in three years. That’s a tiny fraction of the amount spent by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
Shares of AI chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom each dropped 17% on Monday, a route that wiped out a combined $800 billion in market cap. Those stocks led a 3.1% drop in the Nasdaq.
The Navy’s warning landed days earlier.
“We would like to bring to your attention a critical update regarding a new AI model called DeepSeek,” the email said. The memo said it’s “imperative” that team members do not use DeepSeek’s AI “for any work-related tasks or personal use.”
The email was sent on Friday morning to the distribution list OpNav, which stands for Operational Navy, indicating it was an all-hands memo. The warning was based on an advisory from Naval Air Warcraft Center Division Cyber Workforce Manger.
It said recipients were to “refrain from downloading, installing, or using the DeepSeek model in any capacity.”
DeepSeek said on Monday it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services, before later resuming operations as usual.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump, Oracle CTO Larry Ellison (R), and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (2nd-R), speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
President Donald Trump, who took office last Monday, said the sudden rise of DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call” for America’s tech companies. Trump is currently trying to keep Chinese social media app TikTok alive in the U.S., after lawmakers determined that the service must be banned or sold due to national security concerns. Trump was in favor of banning TikTok in his first administration before flip-flopping on the matter.
Venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, posted on X on Monday that DeepSeek R1 “shows that the AI race will be very competitive,” adding that he is “confident in the U.S. but we can’t be complacent.” Meta, which has developed its own open-source models called Llama, started four DeepSeek-related “war rooms” within its generative AI department, The Information reported.
Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, told CNBC last week that DeepSeek’s last AI model was “earth-shattering” and that its R1 release is even more powerful. He said it’s “roughly on par with the best American models” and described the race between the U.S. and China as an “AI war.” Wang’s company provides training data to key OpenAI, Google and Meta.
Trump’s first big move in AI came last week, when his administration announced a joint venture dubbed Stargate between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S.