this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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It's actually API access price, and it's charged per input + output tokens. $0.87 per million tokens is damn cheap.
They probably have super cheap electricity and it's possible they use cheap Chinese Ai chips for inference.
china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid
In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance
This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh
The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.