China’s $300K AI Breakthrough: How DeepSeek’s Budget Model Shook the Tech World
Chinese startup DeepSeek says it trained its R1 language model for $294,000, using 512 Nvidia H800 GPUs over 80 hours, according to a peer-reviewed Nature paper published September 17, 2025. R1, with 670 billion parameters, surpassed OpenAI’s top model on some reasoning benchmarks and triggered a $600 billion drop in Nvidia’s market value after launch.