In Amsterdam, Dutch chipmaking equipment company ASML slid 7%. In Tokyo, Japan’s Softbank Group Corp. lost 8.3% to pull closer to where it was before leaping on an announcement trumpeted by the White House that it was joining a partnership to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure.

US stocks opened lower after Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI model shows AI can be built cheaply. That sparked fears AI spending will stall.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index lost nearly 2.7 percent in early trading, with chipmaker Nvidia down nearly 12 percent.

Big technology stocks including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Tesla tumbled in premarket trading on concerns that a Chinese artificial intelligence startup could threaten America’s dominance in AI. Shares of Nvidia plunged nearly 12% on news reports about the capabilities of DeepSeek — a China-based startup which has made waves in the industry after launching a free,

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.