May 23 (Reuters) – Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek will make permanent a 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 disclose whether the permanent price cut was due to increased supply of Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, which it used to maximize V4’s performance.
The company cut V4‑Pro API costs to between 0.025 and 6 yuan per million tokens (about $0.0035 to $0.83) depending on usage type, from 0.1 to 24 yuan previously, the statement said. A “token” is a unit of text processed by the AI model.
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 curbs on chipmaking equipment exports have limited Huawei’s ability to scale 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 in high-end compute capacity,” limiting availability.
It also said Pro pricing was expected to fall sharply once Huawei Ascend 950 supernodes are launched in large quantities in the second half of the year.
(Reporting by Abu Sultan in Bengaluru and Eduardo Baptista,Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
