
DeepSeek’s Hardware Innovation: Did TPU Clusters Enable the $6M AI Breakthrough?
DeepSeek has made waves in the AI industry by claiming to have trained a 671-billion-parameter model for just $6 million—a fraction of the budget typically required by industry leaders like OpenAI and Meta. To put this into perspective, Meta’s Llama 3 training required 30.8 million GPU hours, while DeepSeek achieved similar results with just 2.8 million hours. This raises an intriguing question: was this cost-saving feat driven by hardware innovations such as TPU clusters, or was it the result of sophisticated software optimizations?