Open reasoning model rivals the frontier — at a fraction of the cost
2025-01DeepSeek (R1)
DeepSeek-R1, an openly released RL-trained reasoning model, matched leading closed models on math and coding — triggering a market reckoning over AI capex.
All actors 
DeepSeek
Profile
Chinese open-weight model developer; drew attention for reaching frontier-class performance with far less compute.
Editorial profile — compiled by us from public sources.
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- Hangzhou, China
Current standings
Standings and milestones are always verified by us against primary sources, regardless of who manages the profile.
Roadmap & milestones
First frontier model shipped on domestic Chinese silicon
2026-04DeepSeek / Huawei
DeepSeek's 1.6T-parameter V4 runs on Huawei Ascend (950PR), and a Huawei-led team completed full-parameter post-training on ~1,000 Ascend 910Cs — a compute-sovereignty landmark. Pre-training hardware remains undisclosed, so "trained without Nvidia" is NOT established.
