Deepseek prices their models based on a 10 month hardware payback period. They report ~$38 revenue/GPU-hour on V4.1-Flash clusters.
Inference is clearly profitable. The question is whether it's profitable enough to justify the training research costs.
V4.1-Flash is probably quite smaller and much more resource effective than the frontier models. Add to that much cheaper energy in China.
Clearly potentially profitable. Not clearly profitable.
How much did it cost to train Deepseek v4.1 flash?
At best, this tells you v4.1 flash is profitable, but can they really get $38 per gpu hour? Sounds like a lot.