Business & Strategy
August 17, 2026DeepSeek's 4x price rise: rethinking cheap open models
DeepSeek's V4-Pro reached general availability on 13 August 2026 with a 1M-token context and strong agent benchmarks, and three days later its peak-hour output price rose from a flat $0.87 to $3.96 per million tokens. For EU teams that built agent cost models around ultra-cheap open-weight APIs, the arithmetic, the data governance questions and the Azure hosting options all deserve a fresh look.
DeepSeek
LLM Pricing
TCO
Open Models
Azure AI Foundry
Data Residency
GDPR
AI Strategy
EU Enterprises
By Falak Mahmood