Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek said it would permanently reduce prices for its flagship V4-Pro AI model by 75%, lowering costs to a quarter of their previous level.
According to a recent report by Reuters, the company said on May 23 that API pricing for the V4-Pro model would now range between 0.025 yuan and 6 yuan per million tokens, depending on usage type, compared with previous rates of between 0.1 yuan and 24 yuan. Tokens are units of text processed by AI systems.
DeepSeek did not specify whether the permanent reduction was linked to increased availability of Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, which the company has used to improve the performance of its V4 models.
The pricing change comes amid broader shifts in China’s semiconductor and AI industries following export restrictions imposed by the United States on advanced chip sales to China. Those controls have limited the ability of NVIDIA to sell some of its most advanced processors in the Chinese market, creating opportunities for domestic chipmakers such as Huawei.
When DeepSeek launched the V4 model last month, the company said the Pro version could cost up to 12 times more than the less powerful Flash version because of constraints in high-end computing capacity.
The company had also indicated that prices could decline significantly once Huawei’s Ascend 950 supernodes became available at larger scale in the second half of the year, as per the Reuters report.