China’s DeepSeek restructures pricing with a permanent 75% cut on V4-Pro AI model

The Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has officially announced a permanent 75% price reduction on its flagship V4-Pro artificial intelligence model.

The primary motive behind this announcement is to confirm that prices will remain at a quarter of their original level.

However, the prominent Chinese AI startup did not reveal whether the permanent price reduction due to production due to an increased supply of Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, when it uses to maximize the V4’s model performance.

The company cut V4-Pro API costs to between 0.025 and 6 yuan per million tokens depending on technical usage.

Huawei’s AI chip sales have benefited from US trade restrictions that prevent Nvidia from selling its most advanced semiconductors in China. 

Meanwhile, semiconductor export controls have limited Huawei’s ability to scale up Ascend production. The newly launched DeepSeek V4 launched this month further highlights this constraint, as competing models can cost up to 12 times more than the less powerful options.

On the other hand its Pro pricing was projected to plunge once Huawei Ascend 95- supernodes are launched in the second half of the year.

The DeepSeek-V4 model previously released has two variants of the V4 model: the more powerful Pro with higher price range and the cheaper Flash variant. 

Furthermore, V4-Pro allows easy integration of Claude Code, OpenClaw and OpenCode.