Semiconductor shares dropped on Friday. Broadcom, SOXL fell 3% each; Super Micro, Nvidia, Marvell slid over 2%.

Nvidia shares have bounced back from lows of less than $130 as investors judge how quickly the company can ramp up sales of its Blackwell AI chips.

One development which could have mixed consequences for Nvidia is the release of a new AI model this week by Chinese start-up DeepSeek. The start-up said its model has capabilities comparable to those released by leading U.S. AI start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic and was trained on Nvidia H800 graphics-processing units (GPUs) for a cost of $5.6 million, a fraction of the amount spent by Western rivals.

While the release shows leading Chinese AI companies still want Nvidia chips, it raises questions over the potential for stricter U.S. restrictions on their export and the return on investment from building ever-larger data centers to train models.

"Does this mean you don't need large GPU clusters for frontier LLMs [large language models]? No but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have, and this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms," wrote Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI who also headed AI at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, on social-media network X.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to deliver a keynote speech at the CES tech show in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. He could disclose more details about the company's next-generation "Rubin" chip.