Nvidia shares almost recover from DeepSeek rout after Grok 3 launch, huge South Korean order

The South Korean government has announced plans to acquire 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia as the country looks to build a national AI computing center.

Semiconductor giant Nvidia's shares have almost recovered from the losses it experienced after Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek launched its low-cost AI model.

Nvidia and DeepSeek logos are seen in this illustration(Reuters)

Nvidia Corporation Common Stock closed at $139.40 on the tech-heavy Nasdaq after the trading session ended on Tuesday, February 18, 2025. This was a rise of 0.40% or $0.55.

This comes after Elon Musk's AI startup xAI launched Grok 3 and an announcement came of the South Korean government looking to order a huge number of chips from the chip maker.

The DeepSeek launch impacted Nvidia stocks since the model used older versions of Nvidia chips and still claimed to rival established Silicon Valley giants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Before the DeepSeek model was launched, Nvidia shares were trading around $142 a piece.

After its launch, the shares plummeted by 17% on January 27, reducing chip maker’s market capitalization by nearly $600 billion. this was the record biggest one-day loss ever by a US-based company.

Things are looking up for Nvidia in other ways as well. The South Korean government has announced plans to acquire 10,000 Graphics-Processing Units (GPUs) from it as the country looks to build a national AI computing center.

These GPUs include Nvidia’s H100 and H200 models, according to a report by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

The country's acting President Choi Sang-mok had made the announcement on Monday during a committee meeting aimed at positioning South Korea as one of the world's top three AI powerhouses.

“Buoyant cloud GPU pricing affirms strong demand environment,” a Barrons report quoted wrote UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri as having written in a research note on Monday. “Looking ahead, given the demand backdrop we would not be surprised if pricing for Hopper instances remains resilient.”