DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026) - Business of Apps

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This page provides usage and revenue statistics for DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot that demonstrated competitive performance at dramatically lower training costs, raising questions about AI compute requirements and US export controls on chips to China.

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Summary

Business of Apps compiles key statistics on DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that achieved performance comparable to ChatGPT at roughly 1/18th the training cost ($5.5M vs $100M+). The resource covers user growth, download figures, and market context, highlighting DeepSeek's disruption of assumptions about AI compute requirements and its geopolitical implications for US chip export controls.

Key Points

•DeepSeek reached 130 million active users by end of 2025 and has been downloaded 175 million times globally.
•DeepSeek V3 cost approximately $5.5 million to train, compared to over $100 million for OpenAI's GPT-4.
•DeepSeek achieved competitive performance despite lacking access to latest Nvidia GPUs (H100/H200) due to US export controls.
•The model's efficiency challenged assumptions underpinning hundreds of billions in planned AI data center investment, causing Nvidia stock to drop 18% in one day.
•DeepSeek is open-source and funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, with no current commercialization commitments.

1 FactBase fact citing this source

Entity	Property	Value	As Of
DeepSeek	Revenue	$220 million	Jun 2025

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 DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026)

 

 
 

 
 
 
 David Curry 

 Updated: March 30, 2026

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A chatbot from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the market in January, due to its ability to perform mathematics, coding and reasoning at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top-tier chatbots while costing far less and using fewer resources.

 The chatbot launched globally on the 20th of January and quickly brought in a lot of users, with claims of it matching ChatGPT in performance luring in AI testers. The underlying model, which is in its third iteration, has been worked on by DeepSeek since November 2023.

 DeepSeek is wholly funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge-fund which utilizes AI for trading algorithms. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, has made each iteration of DeepSeek open-source and available to view, modify and use for free. This has been instrumental in lowering the cost of AI models in China, with ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba cutting prices to compete. - Advertisement - Wenfang has not committed to any form of commercialization for DeepSeek, which may have kept it from being tied down by the Chinese regulators.

 The latest iteration of DeepSeek used about 671 billion parameters and 14.8 trillion tokens, according to its post on transformers library Hugging Face . By comparison, OpenAI&#8217;s GPT 4 was reportedly trained on over one trillion parameters with 13 trillion tokens. Not huge differences, but in terms of cost, DeepSeek V3 apparently cost $5.5 million to train, while GPT 4 cost over $100 million.

 Part of this comes down to the smaller team and cost per engineer, but it&#8217;s also clear that DeepSeek was able to reach similar performance levels with far less processing power. It has less cloud capacity than OpenAI, and also does not have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs, such as the H100 and H200.

 Reaching similar performance has drawn some to speculate that these advanced large language models do not need as much computing power as has been stated, which brings into question the hundreds of billions of dollars major tech companies are allocating to data center development and AI deployment. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of hardware for AI, saw its stock price drop by 18 percent in one day to a four month low.

 It has also drawn into question the United States export controls on advanced chips to China, which was brought into law as a way to slow down the development of AI in China and ensure American companies continue to have a lead in

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