DeepSeek

The GPU Revenue Ladder

The GPU Revenue Ladder

AI infrastructure

Yesterday brought two data points about the health of inference businesses : SpaceX’s third-quarter report1 & DeepSeek’s inference post.2

Overall, they demonstrate that inference businesses can be quite healthy even at current prices & efficiencies. Plus there is a tremendous amount of upside assuming demand persists at higher prices per card hour.

Horizontal bar chart of revenue per GPU card-hour: DeepSeek maximum $38.00, B200 spot $8.77, SpaceX negotiated $5.27, SpaceX realized $2.44
Rung $/card-hour Change from above Provenance
Theoretical maximum revenue, DeepSeek $38.00 — company claim, theoretical
Spot price, B200 $8.77 −77% ORNN, settled 2026-10-20
Negotiated price, SpaceX $5.27 −40% S-1, implied
Realized revenue, SpaceX $2.44 −54% 8-K, derived

DeepSeek calculates a $38 maximum per GPU card-hour.3 It describes a GPU running under optimal conditions : maximum utilization for external customers rather than internal work, & 100% of its output usable & billable, sold at full list price.

Read more
The Thriving Ecosystem of Open Models

The Thriving Ecosystem of Open Models

AI data analysis

Competition is a discovery procedure. — Friedrich Hayek

And developers are discovering the value of open models.

OpenRouter offers a useful view into the model market.1 It is not the whole AI economy. But it is close to the API frontier, where developers can switch models quickly, compare price-performance daily, & route each request to the best available option.

Stacked chart of open versus closed model token share on OpenRouter

Since 2025, open models have grown sharply on OpenRouter. In the latest model-level snapshot, open-weight models generated 69.1% of named open-versus-closed token volume. Closed models produced 30.9%.

Read more