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Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during a news conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Tuesday, June 4, 2024. Nvidia is still working on the certification process for Samsung Electronics Co.’s high-bandwidth memory chips, a final required step before the Korean company can begin supplying a component essential to training AI platforms. 

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia called DeepSeek’s R1 model “an excellent AI advancement,” despite the Chinese startup’s emergence causing the chip maker’s stock price to plunge 17% on Monday.

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling,”  an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC on Monday. “DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”

The comments come after DeepSeek last week released R1, which is an open-source reasoning model that reportedly outperformed the best models from U.S. companies such as OpenAI. R1’s self-reported training cost was less than $6 million, which is a fraction of the billions that Silicon Valley companies are spending to build their artificial-intelligence models. 

Nvidia’s statement indicates that it sees DeepSeek’s breakthrough as creating more work for the American chip maker’s graphics processing units, or GPUs. 

Read more DeepSeek coverage

“Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking,” the spokesperson added. “We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling.”

Nvidia also said that the GPUs that DeepSeek used were fully export compliant. That counters Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang’s comments on CNBC last week that he believed DeepSeek used Nvidia GPUs models which are banned in mainland China. DeepSeek says it used special versions of Nvidia’s GPUs intended for the Chinese market.

Analysts are now asking if multi-billion dollar capital investments from companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta for Nvidia-based AI infrastructure are being wasted when the same results can be achieved more cheaply. 

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it is spending $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week said the social media company planned to invest between $60 to $65 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as part of its AI strategy. 

“If model training costs prove to be significantly lower, we would expect a near-term cost benefit for advertising, travel, and other consumer app companies that use cloud AI services, while long-term hyperscaler AI-related revenues and costs would likely be lower,” wrote BofA Securities analyst Justin Post in a note on Monday.

Nvidia’s comment also reflects a new theme that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have discussed in recent months.

Much of the AI boom and the demand for Nvidia GPUs was driven by the “scaling law,” a concept in AI development proposed by OpenAI researchers in 2020. That concept suggested that better AI systems could be developed by greatly expanding the amount of computation and data that went into building a new model, requiring more and more chips.

Since November, Huang and Altman have been focusing on a new wrinkle to the scaling law, which Huang calls “test-time scaling.” 

This concept says that if a fully trained AI model spends more time using extra computer power when making predictions or generating text or images to allow it to “reason,” it will provided better answers than it would have if it ran for less time. 

Forms of the test-time scaling law are used in some of OpenAI’s models such as o1 as well as DeepSeek’s breakthrough R1 model.

WATCH: DeepSeek challenging sense of U.S. exceptionalism priced into markets, fund manager says

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Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

WATCH: Musk’s share purchase

Elon Musk's Tesla stock purchase is a great vote of confidence, says Sand Hill's Brenda Vingiello

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach  trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.

The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.

CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.

WATCH: EU fines Google almost $3 billion

EU fines Google almost $3 billion over AdTech practices, reports say

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Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.

Read more CNBC tech news

Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.

But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.

As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.

He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.

Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.

White House launches TikTok account

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