DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026) - Business of Apps

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DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026)

DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026)

Updated: April 13, 2026

A chatbot from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the market in January, due to its ability to perform mathematics, coding and reasoning at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top-tier chatbots while costing far less and using fewer resources.

The chatbot launched globally on the 20th of January and quickly brought in a lot of users, with claims of it matching ChatGPT in performance luring in AI testers. The underlying model, which is in its third iteration, has been worked on by DeepSeek since November 2023.

DeepSeek is wholly funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge-fund which utilizes AI for trading algorithms. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, has made each iteration of DeepSeek open-source and available to view, modify and use for free. This has been instrumental in lowering the cost of AI models in China, with ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba cutting prices to compete.

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Wenfang has not committed to any form of commercialization for DeepSeek, which may have kept it from being tied down by the Chinese regulators.

The latest iteration of DeepSeek used about 671 billion parameters and 14.8 trillion tokens, according to its post on transformers library Hugging Face. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT 4 was reportedly trained on over one trillion parameters with 13 trillion tokens. Not huge differences, but in terms of cost, DeepSeek V3 apparently cost $5.5 million to train, while GPT 4 cost over $100 million.

Part of this comes down to the smaller team and cost per engineer, but it’s also clear that DeepSeek was able to reach similar performance levels with far less processing power. It has less cloud capacity than OpenAI, and also does not have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs, such as the H100 and H200.

Reaching similar performance has drawn some to speculate that these advanced large language models do not need as much computing power as has been stated, which brings into question the hundreds of billions of dollars major tech companies are allocating to data center development and AI deployment. Nvidia, the biggest supplier of hardware for AI, saw its stock price drop by 18 percent in one day to a four month low.

It has also drawn into question the United States export controls on advanced chips to China, which was brought into law as a way to slow down the development of AI in China and ensure American companies continue to have a lead in AI.

We have collected data and statistics on DeepSeek. Read on below to find out more. Want to dig deeper? Check out our AI app report.

DeepSeek Key Statistics

DeepSeek had 130 million active users and is the second most popular chatbot in China
DeepSeek third iteration cost $5.5 million to build, 1/18th the cost of OpenAI’s GPT 4
DeepSeek has been downloaded 175 million times
DeepSeek is most popular in China, with 32% of downloads coming from that country

AI App Report 2026

Want to learn more about the AI app industry? Our AI App report offers insights on app financials, market share, users, installs, demographics and benchmarking data.

Charts: 61
Data Points: 966
Apps covered: 25

DeepSeek Overview

Title 1| Title 2

DeepSeek Users

DeepSeek reached 130 million active users at the end of 2025, the majority of which are based in China.

DeepSeek users 2025 (mm)

Date| Users (mm)

Jan 2025| 33 May 2025| 100 Nov 2025| 130

DeepSeek Downloads

DeepSeek has been downloaded 173 million times since its launch in January 2025.

DeepSeek downloads 2025 (mm)

Date| Downloads (mm)

Q1 2025| 83 Q2 2025| 39 Q3 2025| 20 Q4 2025| 18 Q1 2026| 13

Source:AppMagic

DeepSeek Downloads by Country

About 32% of DeepSeek downloads came from China, with the US accounting for 5% of total downloads.

DeepSeek downloads by country 2025 (%)

Country| Users (%)

Source:AppMagic

DeepSeek vs ChatGPT

DeepSeek cost far less to build than GPT 4, even with similar tokens used.

DeepSeek V3 and OpenAI GPT 4 statistics

DeepSeek V3| GPT 4

Source: Company data

AI App Market Landscape

The AI app market is surging, with thousands of apps integrating AI models into their products and major AI apps receiving hundred billion dollar valuations. DeepSeek is at the core of this market, with a popular large language model and chatbot. You can download this map as a PDF, which includes a landscape version.

AI App Users

Over 1.1 billion people use AI apps worldwide, with about 150 million in China alone.

DeepSeek Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026) - Business of Apps