China-based AI startup DeepSeek has announced a permanent 75% reduction in pricing for its flagship V4-Pro artificial intelligence model, intensifying competition in the global AI market. The company confirmed that the discounted rates will remain in place instead of returning to original pricing after the promotional period ends.
The move significantly lowers the cost of using DeepSeek’s most advanced AI model. The company reduced V4-Pro API pricing to between 0.025 yuan and 6 yuan per million tokens, compared to the earlier pricing range of 0.1 yuan to 24 yuan. A token refers to a unit of text processed by an AI model.
The announcement is being seen as a major step in the growing AI pricing battle between Chinese and global AI firms. DeepSeek’s V4-Pro model was launched last month and was initially priced much higher than its Flash version because of limited high-end computing capacity.
At the time of launch, the company had stated that the Pro version could cost up to 12 times more than the lighter Flash variant due to “constraints in high-end compute capacity.” DeepSeek had also indicated that prices could decline once Huawei’s Ascend 950 supernodes become available in larger volumes later in 2026.
The company, however, did not officially confirm whether the permanent price reduction is linked to increased supply of Huawei’s AI chips. Huawei’s semiconductor business has gained momentum after US export restrictions limited Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced AI chips in China.
DeepSeek’s V4-Pro model is designed to support large-scale AI applications and offers a context window of up to 1 million tokens, allowing the system to process and remember significantly larger amounts of information during a single interaction.
The aggressive pricing strategy is expected to increase pressure on global AI providers as companies race to offer more powerful AI models at lower operational costs. Industry observers believe the move could reshape competition in enterprise AI and developer-focused AI services.
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