DeepSeek vs Hugging Face: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
DeepSeek had $70.7M of annual revenue in FY2026. A full-year revenue figure is unavailable here for Hugging Face.
Latest financial snapshot
DeepSeek
- Latest annual revenue
- $70.7M (FY2026)
- Net income
- Unavailable here
- Net margin
- —
- Revenue growth
- +427.6% a year, FY2025–FY2026
Hugging Face
- Latest annual revenue
- Unavailable here
- Net income
- Unavailable here
- Net margin
- —
- Revenue growth
- —
Financial summary
DeepSeek
DeepSeek does not publish revenue or profit figures, and no audited numbers are available; earlier third-party revenue estimates could not be verified and have been removed from this profile. What is reported: the final DeepSeek-V3 training run cost about $5.6 million in rented-GPU terms (2.788 million H800 GPU hours, excluding research and hardware costs), and the company stayed funded by High-Flyer until June 2026. That month it closed a Series A of about 50 billion yuan (~$7.4 billion); Liang personally committed about 20 billion yuan, Tencent about $1.39 billion (10 billion yuan) and CATL about $695 million (5 billion yuan), according to Reuters. Post-money valuation was reported between ~$50 billion (Bloomberg) and ~$59 billion (SCMP). In July 2026 Bloomberg reported talks to raise ~$1.5 billion more at about $71 billion ahead of a mainland IPO targeted for 2027.
Hugging Face
Hugging Face does not publish financial statements. Outside estimates and reporting put its annualized revenue at about $150 million in mid-2026 (The Information), and Delangue told TechCrunch in July 2026 that the company was close to profitability. It raised roughly $400 million in total, the largest round being a $235 million Series D in August 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and Sound Ventures. According to the Financial Times, it turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation in late 2025. In September 2026 Nvidia agreed to pay $12.93 billion for the whole company: about $11.9 billion to stockholders plus up to about $1.0 billion in equity retention awards for employees, roughly 86 times annualized revenue.
Revenue and profit by year
DeepSeek
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $70.7M | — | — | +427.6% | Source |
| FY2025 | $13.4M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $1.5M | — | — | — | Source |
Hugging Face
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 run-rate | $150M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2025 run-rate | $81M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $53M | — | — | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
DeepSeek
No segment breakdown is published.
Hugging Face
- Enterprise Hub Subscriptions~50%
Tiered enterprise seats and corporate licenses providing private model repositories, SOC2 compliance, audit logs, and SSO.
- Serverless Inference Endpoints~30%
Pay-as-you-go GPU compute billing for deploying scalable production machine learning APIs on dedicated cloud hardware.
- Spaces Hardware Rentals & Pro Accounts~20%
Hourly compute fees for upgrading interactive Gradio Spaces to dedicated Nvidia A100/H100 GPUs and developer Pro subscriptions.
Business model and strategy
DeepSeek
How it makes money
DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals. Its consumer chatbot on web and mobile is free. Model weights are published under the MIT license, so anyone can self-host them;
Growth strategy
DeepSeek's growth plan rests on three moves: keep releasing competitive open-weight models (V4-Pro, V4-Flash and the multimodal V4-Flash-Vision-Exp in 2026) to win developers; undercut closed-model API prices to grow paid usage; and reduce dependence on Nvidia by optimising for Chinese chips, shown by its September 2026 open-source toolkit for Huawei's Ascend accelerators.
Competitive advantage
DeepSeek's edge is cost efficiency: its models use sparse Mixture-of-Experts designs (V3 activates 37B of 671B parameters per token; V4-Pro reportedly 49B of 1.6T) and Multi-head Latent Attention, which let it train and serve near-frontier models with far fewer GPUs than US labs. Open MIT-licensed weights and low API prices give it unusually broad developer reach.
Hugging Face
How it makes money
Hugging Face gives away its core platform and libraries and charges for the things companies need once they put open models into production. Public model and dataset hosting is free.
Growth strategy
Hugging Face grows by being the first place open models land and then selling the tools to use them. Recent moves include buying Argilla (data curation) and XetHub (large-file storage) in 2024, buying humanoid robot maker Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and launching the low-cost Reachy Mini robot in July 2025, publishing its own small open models (SmolLM, SmolVLM), and routing Hub users to third-party inference provid…
Competitive advantage
Hugging Face's advantage is a network effect that is hard to copy. Major open-weight models from Meta, Mistral, Alibaba's Qwen team, DeepSeek, Google, and Nvidia are published on the Hub, so developers go there first, which in turn makes it the first place new models are released.
Questions about DeepSeek vs Hugging Face
Which company has higher revenue — DeepSeek or Hugging Face, Inc.?
DeepSeek had $70.7M (FY2026). A comparable annual revenue figure for Hugging Face, Inc. was unavailable here.
How does revenue per employee compare for DeepSeek and Hugging Face, Inc.?
DeepSeek generates $442k / employee in revenue per employee. A comparable figure for Hugging Face, Inc. requires matching employee and revenue data from the same reporting period.
How do DeepSeek and Hugging Face, Inc. make money?
DeepSeek and Hugging Face, Inc. generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. DeepSeek: DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals. Hugging Face, Inc.: Hugging Face gives away its core platform and libraries and charges for the things companies need once they put open models into production.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the DeepSeek vs Hugging Face overview