Pretty sure they are making money since on OpenRouter, there are other providers for DeepSeek V4 flash that are charging even less than DeepSeek themselves (eg DeepInfra and Digital Ocean).
That says little. Those providers could also be losing money trying to gain marketshare. There is a high amount of speculation in the space and it won’t be apparent for awhile who has a lasting business.
That doesn't mean they're making money. Other providers could just be doing it more efficiently. DeepSeek is trying to make its model optimized for Hauwei chips instead of NVIDIA so it has its own constraints
https://openrouter.ai/compare/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash/ten...