A Chinese artificial intelligence company announced Saturday it will permanently slash prices on its most advanced AI model by 75%, according to a company statement.
DeepSeek said the dramatic reduction will keep pricing for its V4-Pro artificial intelligence model at just one-quarter of what customers previously paid. The company did not reveal whether the permanent discount resulted from greater availability of Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, which DeepSeek uses to enhance V4’s capabilities.
According to the statement, DeepSeek reduced V4-Pro API pricing to a range of 0.025 to 6 yuan per million tokens (approximately $0.0035 to $0.83) based on how customers use the service. Previously, costs ranged from 0.1 to 24 yuan. Tokens represent units of text that the AI system processes.
Sales of Huawei’s AI chips have grown due to U.S. trade restrictions that block Nvidia from marketing its most sophisticated semiconductors in China. However, additional limits on equipment exports for chip manufacturing have restricted Huawei’s capacity to increase Ascend production.
During V4’s debut last month, DeepSeek explained that the Pro version would carry prices up to 12 times higher than the less capable Flash version because of “constraints in high-end compute capacity,” which restricted how widely it could be offered.
The company also indicated that Pro pricing would drop significantly once Huawei begins mass production of Ascend 950 supernodes during the year’s second half.
