Enterprise AI costs hit 2026 low driven by price wars, Chinese open-source models: research
Enterprise AI inference costs have reached a 2026 low due to aggressive price wars between major providers and the rise of affordable Chinese open-source models. DeepSeek's V4-Flash model has notably gained significant market share by offering lower costs than international competitors.
Why it matters
Lower AI costs accelerate the adoption of generative AI across global industries, shifting the competitive landscape toward efficiency and open-source alternatives.
The cost for businesses to run AI models has fallen to a yearly low, according to research by investment bank Jefferies, driven by a heated global price war and a surge in adoption of low-cost Chinese open-source tools, such as those from DeepSeek.
Average inference prices – measured per million tokens, or chunks of data handled by a model – ranged between US$1.16 and US$1.18 from August 6 to 8. That marked the lowest level recorded this year, Jefferies said on Monday, citing data from US research firm Silicon Data. Average unit costs have plummeted from US$2.04 on May 31 and US$1.45 in late July.
Silicon Data’s index tracks pricing across business application programming interface (API) providers and open-weight inference platforms used by software developers.
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