Nvidia and other AI chip stocks regained lost ground Tuesday after the ugly sell-off sparked by news related to China's DeepSeek.

The news is the latest sign of skyrocketing valuations for privately held AI start-ups, which show growing investor enthusiasm for AI and confidence that companies like Anthropic will justify that valuation over the long term, eventually generating billions in profits.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the United States' biggest artificial intelligence investors are rethinking where they put a bulk of their combined $131.5 billion last year in the wake of the debut of China's open-source AI model, DeepSeek.