Forensic investigation into DeepSeek’s unit economics: why no Western cloud could match the pre-August $0.28 price, why DeepSeek temporarily hiked rates on August 16 after an 8-trillion-token surge, how V4.1-Flash’s 890-byte CED attention enables Western startups to hit $0.66 profitably today, and why American Big Tech hyperscalers charge a 4,000% markup to service legacy debt.
China’s Flash AI models are not a retreat from frontier AI. They are a deployment strategy built around cheaper inference, domestic chips and agents.