Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
11 hours ago
I think you have to take this on a case by case basis - there is no reason to suppose that the training costs and serving costs are the same for all companies for all models and for all price plans. Some may be profitable, others not.
DeepSeek's models are relatively small, and training costs will be correspondingly lower than for larger models. All you have here is a revenue number - no mention of (training + serving) cost, so while they may well be profitable you can't determine that from this number alone (if it can be trusted).
DeepSeek (investor meeting leak) have previously said that they price their models at a point where the GPU is paid for after 10 months, so something doesn't seem to add up here. If they were making $38/hr per card 24x7, then in 10 months they'd be making $270K per card, while the cards (Huawei?) only cost around $20K.
Presumably cards run on electricity?
That turns out to only be a small part of the cost.
Say a $30,000 GPU has an operational lifetime of 3 years, and draws 1000W. If it is running 24x7 then over those 3 years it will consume 26,280 kWh of electricity, at a cost of say $0.10 per kWh, giving a lifetime electricity cost of $2600, or less than 10% of the cost of the GPU itself.
So, to a first approximation the cost of serving a model is the amortized GPU cost.