DeepSeek revenue hits $70M in seven months with 83% API gross margin
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-27
Per The Information, DeepSeek booked roughly $70M (¥475M) revenue in the first seven months of this year — about 10x its full-2025 revenue — driven by Agent-driven API demand, and without raising prices; the cheap V4-Flash model proved popular with developers globally.
Margins are the highlight: overall gross margin 44.6%, with API gross margin at 82.9% — first-tier territory versus OpenAI's 39% (Q1) and Anthropic's projected 63%. The scale gap remains huge, though: OpenAI did $5.7B in Q1, Anthropic $11.5B in Q2.
Spending is also sprinting: net loss of ¥715M in seven months (vs ¥935M for all of last year), with ¥11B in AI infrastructure spend — nearly 10x last year's ¥1.2B. To offset compute costs, DeepSeek raised API prices this month (V4-Pro output from ¥6 to ¥27/M tokens peak, ¥13.5 off-peak), is raising a new ¥50B round at a ¥500B valuation, and has hired banks for a Shanghai listing next year.
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