alt Hacker NewsDeepseek prices their models based on a 10 month hardware payback period. They report ~$38 revenue/GPU-hour on V4.1-Flash clusters.
Inference is clearly profitable. The question is whether it's profitable enough to justify the training research costs.
Replies
javier2 • today at 1:06 AM
At best, this tells you v4.1 flash is profitable, but can they really get $38 per gpu hour? Sounds like a lot.
➕ show 2 replies
margorczynski • today at 1:17 AM
V4.1-Flash is probably quite smaller and much more resource effective than the frontier models. Add to that much cheaper energy in China.
calmworm • today at 1:29 AM
Clearly potentially profitable. Not clearly profitable.
Are those statements audited or fact checked? Inference profitability is great but how much of that profit gets eaten up paying back training costs, R&D, and operating expenses.