On Saturday, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek revealed cost and revenue estimates for its popular V3 and R1 models, showing a theoretical cost-profit ratio of up to 545% per day. This revelation further challenged the economics of U.S. AI companies like OpenAI that spend billions on cutting-edge chips.
What Happened: In a GitHub post, DeepSeek detailed that its AI inference costs—associated with running trained models—amount to $87,072 per day, assuming a rental price of $2 per hour for each Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) H800 chip, reported Reuters.
In contrast, it estimates daily revenue of $562,027, equating to an annualized revenue of over $200 million.
However, DeepSeek acknowledged that “actual revenue is substantially lower” due to factors such as free web and app access, lower fees for off-peak usage, and the fact that some services …
