Chinese startup DeepSeek recently took center stage in the tech world with its startlingly low usage of compute resources for its advanced AI model called R1, a model that is believed to be competitive with Open AI’s o1 despite the company’s claims that DeepSeek only cost $6 million and 2,048 GPUs to train. However, industry analyst firm SemiAnalysis reports that the company behind DeepSeek incurred $1.6 billion in hardware costs and has a fleet of 50,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs, a finding that undermines the idea that DeepSeek reinvented AI training and inference with dramatically lower investments than the leaders of the AI industry.
