Comment by pimeys
5 hours ago
A few days ago we got the news that DeepSeek makes 38 dollars profit per card with their off peak pricing (in the inference server release discussion).
If that is true, either the American labs are not optimizing correctly or they make a ton of money with inference.
There are lots of reasons Chinese AI companies will always be cheaper than Western AI companies, but chief among them is that China is pouring ludicrous amounts of money into new energy generation projects.
Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear, coal, they are building it all, as we speak, at least 10x more than the US. They are aiming to not just be energy independent, but energy dominant.
You can't now (and certainly won't in the future) be able to run an AI provider in the West as profitably as you can in China.
DeepSeek designs models that require less hardware resources for inference.