DeepSeek Moving to Monetize After Disruption; Hiking Prices and Pursuing Trillions in Funding

China's DeepSeek, which shook the global artificial intelligence market with "ultra-low-cost AI," is now moving into full-scale monetization.

Along with significantly raising service prices, the company is also pushing to attract investments worth about 11 trillion won.

Bloomberg News reported that DeepSeek has recently resumed its second round of fundraising, aiming for about 8 billion dollars, or approximately 11 trillion won.

The corporate value assessed during the current investment process reaches about 500 billion yuan, or roughly 106 trillion won.

This represents a corporate value surge of more than 40 percent in just two months, compared to about 74 trillion won during its first investment round last June.

The newly raised funds are expected to be poured into building large-scale AI infrastructure.

DeepSeek is pushing to build a large AI data center in Inner Mongolia, China, and secure 1 gigawatt of computing infrastructure, comparable to the power generation capacity of a single nuclear reactor.

It is reported that tens of trillions of won are required to build a 1-gigawatt-scale data center equipped with cutting-edge AI accelerators.

At the same time, DeepSeek has signaled changes to its "ultra-low-cost strategy," which had been its greatest weapon.

It has announced to users that it plans to generally raise API service prices soon, and that the hike margin will be substantial.

Currently, DeepSeek's V4-Flash model is priced at 0.14 dollars per 1 million input tokens and 0.28 dollars for output.

This is overwhelmingly cheaper compared to competitors such as China's Moonshot Kimi K3 at 3 dollars and 15 dollars, and US-based Anthropic's latest model at 10 dollars and 50 dollars, respectively.

DeepSeek's pricing policy has previously triggered price competition across the global AI industry.

A new term called the "DeepSeek death zone" even emerged, meaning that survival is difficult unless competitors surpass DeepSeek in price or performance.

However, the situation has changed drastically as AI users have surged.

After unveiling a new model last month, DeepSeek's daily processing volume expanded to the scale of trillions of tokens, and Moonshot also suspended new subscriptions as users flocked to its new model, leading to a shortage of computing resources.

The center of gravity in the AI competition is shifting from price and performance competition of the models themselves to securing massive computing infrastructure such as data centers and GPUs.

With DeepSeek pursuing investment attraction and price hikes simultaneously ahead of its initial public offering, forecasts suggest that China's AI market, which previously relied on ultra-low prices, is also entering full-scale profitability competition.

Reported by Kim Minjeong | Video by Ryu Jisoo | Graphics by Yang Hyemin | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.