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The development of DeepSeek-V3 was probably much more expensive than suggested by the Chinese company, researchers say (www.heise.de)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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DeepSeek is said to have access to tens of thousands of GPU accelerators for the development of its own AI models, including H100 GPUs, which fall under the US export bans. The reported costs of just under 5.6 million US dollars for DeepSeek v3 probably only represent a small part of the total bill.

In the paper on the V3 model, DeepSeek writes of a comparatively small data center with 2048 H800 accelerators from Nvidia. The company calculates hypothetical rental costs of 2 US dollars per hour and H800 GPU. With a total of just under 2.8 million computing hours (distributed across 2048 GPUs), this comes to 5.6 million US dollars.

However, the developers themselves cite a caveat: "Please note that the above costs only include the official training of DeepSeek-V3 and not the costs associated with previous research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms or data."

...

Semianalysis has looked at a realistic cost breakdown. According to the analysts, DeepSeek has access to about 60,000 Nvidia accelerators through its parent company High-Flyer: 10,000 A100s from the Ampere generation before the US export restrictions came into effect, 10,000 H100s from the gray market, 10,000 H800s customized for China, and 30,000 H20s that Nvidia launched after more recent export restrictions.

...

Semianalysis calculates that the servers required for the 60,000 GPUs cost around 1.6 billion US dollars. The operating costs are on top of that. This does not include the salaries of the development teams.

According to DeepSeek, 96 percent of the 5.6 million US dollars quoted is for pre-training. This involves training the final underlying model. The paper ignores the previous development effort, including all the innovations incorporated into DeepSeek V2.

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