DeepSeek slashes V4-Pro price by 75% amid Huawei chip supply dynamics

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek will permanently cut its flagship V4-Pro AI model price by 75%, keeping costs at a quarter of the original and API pricing at 0.025–6 yuan per million tokens. DeepSeek did not specify whether the cut is tied to a higher Huawei Ascend 950 chip supply, but the move comes as Huawei’s AI chips and U.S. export controls shape China’s high-end compute access; when V4 was launched, Pro pricing was up to 12x Flash owing to limited compute, with expectations of steeper declines once Ascend 950 supernodes are deployed more broadly later this year.