Analysis of DeepSeek's Compute Costs and Revenue Model
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-15
The author debunks conspiracy theories about DeepSeek (such as Singapore compute and subsidies) with math: at 10K tokens/s/GPU and $0.28/1M tokens, the annual revenue per GPU is about $88.3K. To hit $500M ARR, it only requires around 5,662 GPUs. This implies DeepSeek's business model is viable without needing conspiracy theories to explain it.
Related event: DeepSeek inference economics: sizing the GPU fleet behind its ARR(8 posts)→
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