Shares of Nvidia fell Tuesday, trading at $191.70, down $3.85, or 1.97 percent, after a Reuters report said Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek is developing its own semiconductor for AI computing, a move that could reduce the startup's reliance on chips from both Nvidia and Huawei.

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According to the Reuters report, citing three sources familiar with the matter, DeepSeek's chip is being designed specifically for inference, the stage of AI computing in which an already-trained model generates responses to user queries, rather than for training new models from scratch. That focus places the project squarely within what has become the fastest-growing segment of AI computing demand, as more of the industry's overall workload shifts from building large language models to running them for end users. Inference tasks can often be handled by specialized, lower-cost chips that consume less power than the general-purpose graphics processing units Nvidia has built its business around.

The effort reportedly began roughly a year ago and remains in its early stages. According to the Reuters report, DeepSeek has been in discussions with outside chip-design firms, semiconductor foundries and memory suppliers as part of the initiative, while also quietly increasing its hiring of chip-design engineers in recent months without posting public job listings for those specific roles.

DeepSeek's move would mark a significant strategic shift for a company that has been held up in China as a national AI success story since it........

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