DeepSeek vs NVIDIA: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
DeepSeek had $70.7M of annual revenue in FY2026. NVIDIA had $215.9B of annual revenue in FY2026 and $120.1B of net income.
Latest financial snapshot
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.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA's revenue rose from $27.0B in fiscal 2023 to $60.9B in FY2024, $130.5B in FY2025 and $215.9B in FY2026, which ended January 25, 2026. FY2026 GAAP net income was $120.1B, operating cash flow was $102.7B and company-defined free cash flow was $96.6B. Growth continued into fiscal 2027: Q2 (ended July 26, 2026) revenue was $96.2B, including $89.0B of Data Center revenue, with a 75.0% GAAP gross margin and $59.7B GAAP net income. The $108.0B Q3 FY2027 revenue figure, plus or minus 2%, was management guidance, not a reported result; the outlook assumed no Data Center compute revenue from China. NVIDIA returned about $26.0B to shareholders in Q2, and reported about $99.0B remaining under its repurchase authorization at quarter-end. Its May 2026 dividend increase to $0.25 per share is separate from the repurchase authorization.
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 |
NVIDIA
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $215.9B | $120.1B | 55.6% | +65.5% | Source |
| FY2025 | $130.5B | $72.9B | 55.8% | +114.2% | Source |
| FY2024 | $60.9B | $29.8B | 48.8% | +125.9% | Source |
| FY2023 | $27B | $4.4B | 16.2% | +0.2% | Source |
| FY2022 | $26.9B | $9.8B | 36.2% | +61.4% | Source |
| FY2021 | $16.7B | $4.3B | 26.0% | +52.7% | Source |
| FY2020 | $10.9B | $2.8B | 25.6% | -6.8% | Source |
| FY2019 | $11.7B | $4.1B | 35.3% | +20.6% | Source |
| FY2018 | $9.7B | $3B | 31.4% | +40.6% | Source |
| FY2017 | $6.9B | $1.7B | 24.1% | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
DeepSeek
No segment breakdown is published.
NVIDIA
- Data CenterDominant
GPU accelerators, AI systems, networking, and software for cloud, enterprise, and supercomputing customers.
- GamingMaterial
GeForce GPUs and gaming-platform products for PC gamers, creators, and consumer AI PCs.
- Professional Visualization
Complementary
Workstation GPUs, visualization, simulation, and Omniverse-related products.
- AutomotiveGrowth
Automotive compute, software, and autonomous-driving platforms.
- Software And ServicesGrowth
Enterprise AI software, cloud services, libraries, and platform subscriptions layered on hardware.
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.
NVIDIA
How it makes money
NVIDIA is a fabless chip and systems company: it designs GPUs, CPUs, networking and software, and outsources manufacturing mainly to TSMC. Data Center is the core business, at $193.7B of FY2026 revenue (about 90%) and $89.0B of the $96.2B earned in Q2 FY2027.
Growth strategy
NVIDIA wants to sell the whole AI factory, not just accelerators. It ships a new architecture roughly every year: Blackwell, then Blackwell Ultra, then Vera Rubin, which reached full production in mid-2026. Each rack combines GPUs, Vera CPUs, NVLink, Spectrum-6 switches and BlueField DPUs.
Competitive advantage
NVIDIA's lead comes from three things working together. CUDA has been in use since 2006 and much of the AI software stack is tuned for it. NVIDIA sells full systems that tie compute, NVLink and networking into one rack. Its scale also gets it priority access to TSMC wafers and high-bandwidth memory.
Questions about DeepSeek vs NVIDIA
Which company has higher revenue — DeepSeek or NVIDIA Corporation?
DeepSeek had $70.7M (FY2026), while NVIDIA Corporation had $215.9B (FY2026). By latest annual revenue, NVIDIA Corporation is the larger business, with DeepSeek showing a smaller revenue base.
What is the market cap of DeepSeek vs NVIDIA Corporation?
NVIDIA Corporation has a market capitalisation of $5.45T. A public market cap figure for DeepSeek was not available (it may be privately held).
How does revenue per employee compare for DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation?
DeepSeek has $442k / employee in revenue per employee, while NVIDIA Corporation has $5.14M / employee. Headcounts may use different dates, so the ratio alone does not establish which business operates more efficiently.
How do DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation make money?
DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation 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. NVIDIA Corporation: NVIDIA is a fabless chip and systems company: it designs GPUs, CPUs, networking and software, and outsources manufacturing mainly to TSMC.
Is DeepSeek bigger than NVIDIA Corporation?
By last reported revenue, NVIDIA Corporation ($215.9B (FY2026)) is the larger company compared to DeepSeek ($70.7M (FY2026)). Revenue scale is one dimension of size — market capitalisation, employee count, and geographic reach are also relevant depending on the context.
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 NVIDIA overview