{"id":871,"date":"2025-03-03T06:26:43","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T06:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/?p=871"},"modified":"2025-03-03T06:26:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T06:26:43","slug":"deepseek-reveals-ai-cost-profit-estimates-but-reality-looks-much-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/archives\/871","title":{"rendered":"DeepSeek Reveals AI Cost-Profit Estimates, But Reality Looks Much Different"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Chinese AI startup&nbsp;<strong>DeepSeek<\/strong>&nbsp;just gave a rare glimpse into the costs and potential revenue of its&nbsp;<strong>V3 and R1 models<\/strong>, claiming an eye-popping&nbsp;<strong>theoretical cost-profit ratio of 545% per day<\/strong>. Sounds impressive, but the company was quick to dial down expectations, admitting that actual revenue is much lower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/yz5yck\/article69284299.ece\/alternates\/LANDSCAPE_1200\/2025-03-01T065516Z_1114123023_RC2TJCA591CR_RTRMADP_3_CHINA-USA-AI.JPG\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In a GitHub post, DeepSeek estimated that renting one<strong>&nbsp;Nvidia H800 chip<\/strong>\u2014the hardware it uses\u2014costs&nbsp;<strong>$2 per hour<\/strong>, putting its daily inference costs at&nbsp;<strong>$87,072<\/strong>. In contrast, the models could theoretically pull in&nbsp;<strong>$562,027 per day<\/strong>, which over a year would translate to&nbsp;<strong>more than $200 million in revenue<\/strong>. But that\u2019s just the math on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&gt;&gt;&gt;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/detail\/1746489\/GZE8U\">GZE8U<\/a>&nbsp;for&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/brand\/4\/Google\">Google<\/a>&nbsp;Pixel 7<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>DeepSeek pointed out that&nbsp;real earnings are significantly lower&nbsp;for several reasons. The&nbsp;V3 model costs less to use than the R1, not all services are monetized (web and app access are still free), and&nbsp;developers pay less during off-peak hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What makes this even more interesting is that DeepSeek is using&nbsp;Nvidia\u2019s H800 chips, which are&nbsp;far less powerful&nbsp;than the ones available to U.S. AI giants like OpenAI. With companies like OpenAI and Google pouring billions into high-end hardware, DeepSeek\u2019s numbers raise an interesting question:&nbsp;<strong>is cutting-edge AI hardware really necessary to run a profitable AI business, or is efficiency the real key?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chinese AI startup&nbsp;DeepSeek&nbsp;just gave a rare glimpse into the costs and potential revenue of its&nbsp;V3 and R1 models, claiming an eye-popping&nbsp;theoretical cost-profit ratio of 545% per day. Sounds impressive, but the company was quick to dial down expectations, admitting that actual revenue is much lower. In a GitHub post, DeepSeek estimated that renting one&nbsp;Nvidia H800 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":872,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions\/872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}