Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek will take a permanent 75% price cut on its flagship V4-Pro artificial intelligence model, keeping prices at a quarter of their original level, the company said in a statement on Saturday.
DeepSeek did not reveal whether the permanent price cut was due to increased supply of Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, which were used to maximize the V4’s performance.
The company reduced V4-Pro API costs to between 0.025 and 6 yuan per million tokens (about $0.0035 to $0.83), depending on the type of use, from 0.1 to 24 yuan previously, according to the statement. A “token” is a unit of text processed by the AI model.
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Huawei’s AI chip sales have benefited from U.S. export controls that prevent Nvidia from selling its most advanced semiconductors in China, although separate restrictions on exports of chipmaking equipment have limited Huawei’s ability to ramp up Ascend production.
When DeepSeek launched V4 last month, it said the Pro version would cost up to 12 times more than the less powerful Flash version due to “constraints on edge computing capacity” limiting availability.
