DeepSeek's DSec: Paper Release Sparks Cost Analysis

Episode 1 · DeepSeek Unveils DSec Elastic Compute Paper: 3 Million Sandboxes Per Day (2026-09-23, 5 posts)

On September 23, the DeepSeek team published the paper "DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale" on arXiv, systematically disclosing its production-grade sandbox infrastructure for large-scale agent training and evaluation, with Liang Wenfeng among the named authors. This is the first time DeepSeek has publicly revealed the scale details of the compute architecture underlying its agent training, showing its agent training has reached industrial-scale production.

Confirmed

• The paper was published on arXiv, on DSec (DeepSeek Elastic Compute), positioned as a sandbox infrastructure for large-scale agent training and evaluation
• A single production DSec unit spans about 160 nodes, equipped with about 30,000 CPU cores and 250TB of memory
• Design targets roughly 3 million AI agent environments per day, with 5,000+ new sandboxes created per second
• Production peak concurrency supports more than 380,000 sandboxes
• The system unifies multiple execution forms including FnCall, containers, and microVMs
• Liang Wenfeng is one of the paper's named authors

Why It Matters

• The paper is a rare public disclosure of an agent training infrastructure's scale by a leading LLM company, offering a reference for assessing the compute forms needed for agent training
• 5,000+ sandbox creations per second and 380,000 peak concurrency mean DeepSeek is conducting large-scale agent training and evaluation at extremely high throughput, indirectly reflecting the intensity of its investment in agents
• The architecture unifying FnCall, containers, and microVMs is directly useful to engineering teams building similar sandbox infrastructures

• DeepSeek Elastic Compute Paper Reveals 160-Node Units Serving 3M Sandboxes Daily — zephyr_z9 · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek Unveils DSec: 3M Agent Environments Daily, 380k Concurrent Sandboxes — jiqizhixin · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek unveils DSec sandbox infra running 3M agent environments per day — jiqizhixin · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek paper details DSec: 3M sandboxes a day for Agent training, and the agents fight back — 量子位 · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek paper introduces DSec, elastic sandbox infra for agentic training at scale — pstAsiatech · 2026-09-23

Episode 2 · DeepSeek Sandbox Cluster Details Emerge, Estimated $20M Per Unit (2026-09-23, 3 posts)

Analysts estimate DeepSeek's DSec sandbox cluster costs under $20M in materials per unit. Its scale was corrected to 320 AMD EPYC 9655 CPUs (30,720 cores) across 160 nodes.

• DeepSeek's DSec sandbox fleet: ~384 EPYC 9655 CPUs powering 380k concurrent sandboxes at ~30% utilization — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek DSec cluster BoM estimated at ≤$20M; $1B could buy 50 clusters and 19M concurrent sandboxes — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-23
• DeepSeek's DSec Sandbox Fleet Is ~320 EPYC 9655 Chips, 30,720 Cores — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-23