750,000 Chips, 140 Trillion Tokens: The Math Behind DeepSeek's Permanent Price Cut
DeepSeek has made a permanent 75% price cut on its V4-Pro API, effective May 22, 2026. This decision comes amid increasing demand for AI tokens and frustrations with competitors' rate limits. The price reduction is seen as a strategic move to secure market share rather than a reflection of surplus capacity.
- ▪DeepSeek's V4-Pro API pricing has been reduced to ¥3 per million tokens for input and ¥6 for output.
- ▪The company is responding to a significant increase in daily token consumption in China, which reached 140 trillion in March 2026.
- ▪DeepSeek's price cut is intended to lock in commitments from users before the new hardware becomes available.
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try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3921069) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } keeper Posted on May 23 750,000 Chips, 140 Trillion Tokens: The Math Behind DeepSeek's Permanent Price Cut #ai #hardware #china #cloud DeepSeek made its V4-Pro 75% price cut permanent on May 22. The conventional read: "they got cheaper hardware." The real story is more interesting — and it's about a gap that's not closing fast enough. What Happened On May 22, 2026, DeepSeek announced that the 75% discount on its V4-Pro API would become permanent.
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