Power stocks plunge as energy needs called into question because of new China AI lab
Power companies that are most exposed to the tech sector's data center boom plunged early Monday, as the debut of China's DeepSeek open-source AI laboratory led investors to question how much energy artificial intelligence applications will actually consume.
Constellation Energy and Vistra tumbled more than 16% in early trading. GE Vernova slid about 18% while Talen Energy lost more than 15%.
Constellation, Vistra and GE Vernova have led the S&P 500 this year as investors speculated that AI data centers will boost demand for enormous amounts of electricity. All three suffered as the market was pulled lower Monday by investor worries about AI competition from China.
DeepSeek released an AI model on Christmas Day that Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang described in an interview with CNBC last week as "earth shattering." Scale AI provides training data for AI applications.
DeepSeek followed up last week with the release of a reasoning model named DeepSeek-R1 that competes with OpenAI's o1 model. DeepSeek has since risen to the top of mobile app stores. Wang said DeepSeek has essentially caught up with OpenAI.
"Their model is actually the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang told CNBC's Andrew Sorkin in a Jan. 23 interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has described DeepSeek as "super-compute efficient." Bank of America analysts said in a Monday note that DeepSeek is "challenging the notion of U.S. leadership in AI and raising doubts about the high expectations for cloud capex, chip growth and power requirements."
The tech companies have anticipated needing so much electricity to supply data centers that they have increasingly looked to nuclear power as a