Re-estimating DeepSeek Inference Costs
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-20
Based on the DSpark paper and a previous V4 serving report, a post re-estimates the inference costs of the DeepSeek V4 series across different context lengths. The chart indicates: at 10K/100K/1M contexts, costs are roughly $0.764/$0.770/$0.821 per million output tokens for V4-Flash, and $2.870/$2.878/$2.952 for V4-Pro.
Using real-world production throughput and an assumption of $2/GPU-hour, the author estimates more realistic costs: V4-Flash at approx. $0.035/M output tokens, V4-Pro at $0.10/M, and a 50/50 mix at $0.067/M.
The author emphasizes that these production figures are much lower than batch-1 roofline estimates because continuous batching distributes MoE weight traffic across numerous concurrent requests. The 60–85% Flash and 57–78% Pro improvements mentioned primarily reflect latency/interactivity gains, not direct cost savings.
More from Infra
- Anthropic S-1 reveals 48 cents of compute cost per dollar of Q2 revenue — nmasc_ · 2026-10-26
- Persistent AI joins UR network to route private AI inference with encrypted, IP-hidden traffic — 0xSammy · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic's disclosed compute commitments: $114.5B Google, $161.2B Broadcom top the list — BenBajarin · 2026-10-26
- SpaceX strikes $40B deal with Apollo Global to lease AI chips and data center hardware — Polymarket · 2026-10-26
- SpaceX AI revenue up 830%, Claude designs 318K antivenom proteins in 64 hours — PeterDiamandis · 2026-10-26
- Meta plans up to $95 billion stock sale to fund AI buildout — The Decoder · 2026-10-26