Because Nvidia is still growing its revenue rapidly, using trailing earning metrics can give a false impression of where the company is headed. However, they're also useful in this case because its future had a wrench thrown into it thanks to DeepSeek's breakthrough.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has gotten off to a bad start on the stock market in 2025, losing more than 10% of its value as of this writing, with Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek's launch of a low-cost but capable AI model playing a key role in the semiconductor giant's troubles.