[gitah]

If you're going to compare OpenRouter numbers for DeepSeek at least use the same metric to compare Gemini. During last week DeepSeek V4 Flash did 3.72T tokens which is way higher than combined token counts for Gemini (2.5 Flash + 3.5 Flash + 3.1 Pro)

DeepSeek's official API, which has 10x cheaper cached input cost isn't even on OpenRouter as a provider, so just like Google, most volume is not going through OpenRouter. (Gemini's official hosted api is on OpenRouter BTW)

Also you're comparing an API with Google's internal corporate and consumer app use. Bytedance announced they were using 63T tokens/day (441T / week) at the end of 2025, so they are probably even higher than Google now. We don't know how much weekly tokens the DeepSeek chatapp uses, but it would also be a very high number much higher than OpenRouter tokens.

For the real reason of the recent price drops, go ask your AI about how much it would cost to run DeepSeek V4 or MiMo 2.5 after Ascend 950 PR have started to be mass delivered in 2026 Apr at $10k / card.

[827a]

The issue you're not seeing is: Western corporations, the primary drivers of AI spend globally, are not forming business relationships with nationalized Chinese AI labs in order to directly use the DeepSeek API. They're using it through western proxies like OpenRouter, if they're doing it all (newsflash: they aren't). They are forming business relationships with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI to directly use their APIs.

[gmerc]

You can access Deepseek on Azure, Perplexity, Cohere, Bedrock what are you hallucinating about

[827a]

I'm well aware (no one is using it there, either).