DeepSeek announced on August 6th plans to implement a substantial price increase across all its API services; details of the new pricing structure will be provided in an official notification. This news emerged just weeks after the V4 Flash model ranked first in the weekly global token usage leaderboard on OpenRouter, achieving 7.22 trillion tokens.
The main offerings remain V4 Pro and V4 Flash. The current price for V4 Flash is 0.02 yuan per million tokens for cached inputs, 1 yuan for uncached inputs, and 2 yuan for output.
The price increase is attributed to rising computational costs. Previously, in April, DeepSeek had lowered the price for V4 Pro cached inputs and ran a limited promotion offering a 75 percent discount until May 5th. On May 23rd, the company announced that after the promotion ended on May 31st, the price would rise to one-quarter of the original retail rate.
In the same week, Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 API announced a permanent price reduction of up to 99 percent, leading to a sharp collapse in the price war within the domestic market.
A turning point occurred at the end of June. In an email from DeepSeek, users were informed that the official V4 version was scheduled for mid-July, and this new release would include pricing based on peak and off-peak hours. During peak weekday load times, API prices will double. For V4 Pro, the price for cached inputs will increase from 0.025 to 0.05 yuan per million tokens, for uncached inputs—from 3 to 6 yuan, and for output—from 6 to 12 yuan. V4 Flash will also double its tariffs in a similar manner.
This current round of increases is a general uplift. According to industry analysis, the previously introduced structure with peak and off-peak hours was more of a standardization tool for distributing scarce computing resources than a direct price hike, as it involved predictable timeframes and multipliers. The new phase raises the baseline tariff level. DeepSeek's computation costs have grown in sync with demand growth. For instance, on August 1st, the OpenCode platform registered 8 trillion tokens of V4 Flash traffic, and on August 4th, the V4 Flash API experienced overload due to unprecedented incoming traffic volume.
DeepSeek is not alone in these trends. At a briefing on Zhipu AI's performance, CEO Zhang Peng announced that in the first quarter of 2026, API prices had increased by 83 percent compared to the previous year, while API call volume grew by 400 percent. In June, Doubao Pro introduced a three-tiered subscription priced at 68, 200, and 500 yuan per month. In July, Kimi suspended new consumer registrations after K3 launch traffic exceeded cluster capacity for 48 hours. The entire industry is shifting from a 'lowest price wins' strategy to a 'sustainable cost structure' model. Training and maintaining advanced models on Chinese computing power are no longer a loss leader endlessly subsidized by the rest of the stack.
The DeepSeek V4-Flash model became the leader of the weekly OpenRouter ranking, processing 7.1 trillion tokens. Additionally, nine Chinese models entered the top ten global leaders.
According to OpenRouter data, DeepSeek V4-Flash took first place in model call volume just four days after the public API beta version launched on July 31. In one week, from July 28 to August 3, the model processed 7.1 trillion tokens. The second through fifth places were also occupied by Chinese products: Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 with 5.4 trillion tokens, Tencent Hy3 with 4.89 trillion, DeepSeek V4-Pro with 3.1 trillion, and Zhipu GLM-5.2 with 2.87 trillion. The DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 model independently rose to eighth place, processing 2.33 trillion tokens. On August 3 alone, version 0731 registered 1.02 trillion tokens, surpassing the previously dominant version 0423.
The total global weekly volume of AI model calls reached 56.8 trillion tokens. The weekly volume of calls for Chinese models was 28.13 trillion, exceeding US volumes for the fourteenth consecutive week. Chinese models hold nine out of the top ten spots. The official V4-Flash version uses the same architecture as the preliminary version: MoE, 284 billion shared parameters, of which 13 billion are activated, with a context window of 1 million tokens. Changes were only made to post-training: the official V4-Flash version achieved a score of 25.2 in the Agent Ultimate test, approaching the Claude Opus-4.8 score of 25.7, which is significantly higher than the preliminary V4-Pro version, which scored 15.8.
Pricing is almost unmatched: $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. In weighted task testing, V4-Flash costs 3 cents per task, Kimi K3 costs 86 cents, GPT-5.6 Sol costs $1.86, and Claude Fable 5 costs $3.15. Operating costs are less than one percent of the flagship product Anthropic Claude Fable 5. On the social network X, developers wrote that Musk should personally test V4 Flash, comparing it to magic. Users then noticed that Elon Musk had indeed subscribed to the official DeepSeek account. Nearly half of DeepSeek's traffic comes from developers in the US and Europe, and many agent automation projects have switched their default models to DeepSeek. Founders of several foreign AI startups publicly noted that after fully switching to DeepSeek, monthly inference costs decreased by 60–85 percent.
Industry analysis indicates that DeepSeek has set a clear boundary in the global developer market. This boundary is not just a performance threshold but a balance between price and quality. Models offering a similar level of capabilities but at a significantly higher price will continuously lose mid-tier developers; products weaker than DeepSeek in performance but more expensive will face a rapid narrowing of their survival space. OpenAI also felt the pressure: GPT-5.6 Luna lowered its prices by 80 percent within three weeks of its release. From the public beta API on July 31 to entering the top global call volume on August 3, DeepSeek V4-Flash took less than a week.
The industry is showing increased interest in chip speed, but significant performance losses occur in the interaction between the chips themselves. In dense artificial intelligence clusters, GPUs often operate at only 30–40% capacity, meaning that most of the time powerful chips are idle waiting for data rather than processing it.
The startup Eliyan, which has received support from Cisco, raised $145 million with a company valuation of one billion dollars to address this issue. As cluster sizes increase, data transfer speed becomes insufficient. Simply increasing data volume through conventional copper wires leads to increased power consumption, heat generation, and ultimately, slower chip operation. Eliyan offers a solution to this problem.
Eliyan does not manufacture the chips itself; instead, it creates the connections between them. Founded in Santa Clara by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheil, and Cyrus Ziae, the company uses its NuLink PHY cores to move data between crystals on the same package and between separately packaged chips. Its NuGear chiplets are responsible for memory scaling and inter-rack scaling.
The most critical aspect for chip manufacturers is packaging. Many competing methods require the use of expensive silicon interposers to achieve high throughput. Eliyan's chiplets achieve comparable metrics using standard organic substrates, allowing chip designers to increase throughput without completely redesigning the chip's physical layout.
The funding round was led by Seligman Ventures, and Seligman Managing Partner Umesh Padwal joined Eliyan's board of directors. He was previously a member of the Mellanox board before its acquisition by Nvidia for $6.9 billion, an event that changed the industry's perception of networking technologies. Cisco and Lumentum are new strategic investors: Cisco has a division specializing in optics and silicon, and Lumentum manufactures lasers and optical modules that hyperscale data centers will purchase. In addition to these, Eliyan has received support from several leaders in the chip industry.
Prior to this round, Eliyan had investments from AMD, Arm, Meta, Coherent, Intel Capital, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. Investors who invest at such early stages typically aim to participate in shaping future technologies rather than just seeking profit. The company stated that it plans to begin shipping its first chiplets later this year and expects to reach hundreds of millions of dollars by 2027. Furthermore, the company holds over 100 patents.
Eliyan's main bet is that interconnectivity is the bottleneck for chiplets, and the company owns the intellectual property to solve it. This gives it an advantage over major players like Nvidia and Intel, who are beginning to focus on the same problem. The next phase of the AI race will be determined not by who releases the fastest chip, but by who can move data across the entire warehouse of such chips without exceeding the power budget, and it is in this race that Eliyan attracted $145 million.
