DeepSeek Was Supposed to Make AI Cheap. Its Next Move Could Be More Important.

DeepSeek’s rising prices may signal a deeper shift in AI economics — one that could reshape the battle over compute, pricing power, and the U.S.–China AI race.

On January 27, 2025, Nvidia lost roughly $589 billion in market value in a single trading day , at the time the largest one-day destruction of market capitalization in U.S. stock-market history. DeepSeek had reported that the final training run for its V3 model consumed 2.788 million Nvidia H800 GPU-hours, corresponding to an estimated compute cost of around $5.6 million under commonly used rental assumptions. That figure was repeatedly misinterpreted as the total cost of building DeepSeek’s mo…