What DeepSeek actually claimed: "DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, o

What DeepSeek actually claimed: "DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M. Note that the aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437 They don't even claim to have spent $5M (since they own their GPUs instead of renting them by the hour), it's a purely notional figure suitable for an academic paper. But when R1 got released and started generating hype, it was the only dollar figure anyone had to go on, so it got interpreted as more significant than it is.