India, March 1 -- DeepSeek, the Chinese technology company that launched its revolutionary R1 model in January, has revealed that its "theoretical" profit margin could be over five times its costs. This is one of the few times that something close to the actual expenses of developing and running an AI model have been released to the public.

The new startup, which brought waves and a stock rout in the global technology industry with its innovative and inexpensive approach to building AI models, said its V3 and R1 models' cost of inferencing to sales during a 24-hour period on February 28 put profit margins at 545%.

Inferencing refers to the computing power, electricity, data storage and other resources needed to make AI models work in re...