DeepSeek’s AI costs far exceed $5.5 million claim, may have reached $1.6 billion with 50,000 Nvidia GPUs

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In brief: China’s DeepSeek threw the multi-billion-buck AI industry into chaos impartial impartial today with the free up of its R1 mannequin, which is declared to compete with OpenAI’s o1 regardless of being expert on 2,048 Nvidia H800s and at a mark of $5.576 million. Nonetheless, a unique account claims that the gorgeous fees incurred by the agency were $1.6 billion, and that DeepSeek has web entry to to around 50,000 Hopper GPUs.

The claim that DeepSeek became once in a tell to coach R1 the usage of a share of the resources required by mountainous tech firms invested in AI wiped a file $600 billion off Nvidia’s allotment mark in a single day. If the Chinese language startup to could maybe perhaps like a mannequin this highly efficient without spending billions on Team of workers Green’s most highly efficient AI GPUs, what would cease every person else doing it?

But did DeepSeek no doubt web its Mixture-of-Specialists mannequin, which aloof tops the Apple App Store charts, on the form of low mark? SemiAnalysis claims that it didn’t.

The market intelligence agency writes that DeepSeek has web entry to to around 50,000 Hopper GPUs, at the side of 10,000 H800s and 10,000 H100. It also has orders for quite a lot of more China-disclose H20s. The GPUs are shared between High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund within the encourage of DeepSeek, and the startup. They are allotted all thru several geographical locations and are inclined for procuring and selling, inference, training, and compare.

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Courtesy of SemiAnalysis

SemiAnalysis writes that DeepSeek has invested mighty higher than the claimed $5.5 million resolve that sent the stock market into a tailspin – the account states that this pre-training mark is a extremely narrow allotment of the entire. The company’s overall investment in servers is around $1.6 billion, with around $944 million spent on operating fees. The GPU investments, within the period in-between, memoir for higher than $500 million.

As a reference instance, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet mark tens of hundreds of hundreds of bucks to coach, however the company aloof wished to expand billions of bucks of investment from Google and Amazon.

Or now no longer it’s renowned that DeepSeek has sourced all its abilities completely from China. That’s a distinction to reviews of diverse Chinese language tech firms, akin to Huaweitrying to poach workers from out of the country, with Taiwanese workers of TSMC being highly sought-after targets. DeepSeek allegedly offers salaries of over $1.3 million for promising candidates, mighty higher than competing Chinese language AI firms pay.

DeepSeek also has the finest thing about mostly running its beget datacenters, quite than having to depend on external cloud providers. This permits for more experimentation and innovation all thru its AI product stack. SemiAnalysis writes that it’s miles the one easiest “open weights” lab today, beating out Meta’s Llama effort, Mistral, and others.

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