DeepSeek unveils its newest model at rock-bottom prices and with ‘full support’ from Huawei chips

Chinese AI company DeepSeek has unveiled its long-awaited V4 model.

On Friday, the Hangzhou-based startup released its newest large language model in a preview capacity. The release comes over a year after it shook markets and reset the entire conversation around AI with its V3 and R1 models, which showed that frontier-level performance could be achieved through an open-source model trained on a relatively tiny budget.

V4 may not have as large of an effect on markets as its predecessor did. So far, the biggest impacts have been on the shares of other Chinese companies. Shares in Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation jumped 10% in Hong Kong trading. That Chinese chipmaker makes Huawei’s Ascend AI processors, which DeepSeek said it used to train its new model. (Huawei has been trying to catch up to the performance of Nvidia’s GPUs, which most companies use for training AI models.) Meanwhile, shares in Minimax and Knowledge Atlas, two of DeepSeek’s competitors, sank by more than 9%.

Yet the increasingly narrow performance gap between DeepSeek and leading U.S. models, as well as its rock-bottom prices, will raise questions about the competitive moat that surrounds leading U.S. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic—and the constraints that still hold back China’s AI development.

So, how good is DeepSeek’s new model?

DeepSeek released two versions on Friday: “DeepSeek-V4-Pro,” which it said had “performance rivaling the world’s top closed-source models,” and “DeepSeek-V4-Flash,” a smaller and cheaper variant. The Pro version has 1.6 trillion parameters, the tunable knobs within a neural network that serve as a measure of a model’s size, and a context length of 1 million tokens. (A token is the fundamental building block used by an LLM to understand and generate text; a million tokens is roughly equivalent to 750,000 words)

The startup claims its model beats all other open-source models in agentic coding and reasoning. DeepSeek also pointed to benchmarks that showed V4 performing favorably against Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, and Google’s Gemini 3.1-Pro. The startup’s tech report says that V4 “falls marginally short of GPT-5.4 and Gemin i3.1-Pro,........

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