Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has announced that it will permanently reduce the price of its flagship AI model V4-Pro by 75%, bringing the cost down to a quarter of the previous price.
According to a recent report from Reuters, the company announced on May 23 that the API price for the V4-Pro model will be 0.025 yuan to 6 yuan per million tokens, compared to the previous 0.1 yuan to 24 yuan, depending on the usage type. A token is a unit of text that is processed by an AI system.
DeepSeek did not say whether this permanent reduction is related to increased availability of the Ascend 950 chip, which the company is using to improve the performance of its V4 models.
The price changes come amid broader changes in China’s semiconductor and AI industries following export restrictions imposed by the United States on the sale of advanced chips to China. The regulations limit Nvidia’s ability to sell some of its most advanced processors in the Chinese market, creating opportunities for domestic chipmakers such as Huawei.
When DeepSeek launched its V4 model last month, the company said the Pro version could cost up to 12 times more than the less powerful Flash version due to high-end computing power constraints.
The company also suggested that prices could drop significantly once Huawei’s Ascend 950 supernode becomes available on a large scale in the second half of this year, according to a Reuters report.
