What Matters Today DeepSeek Plans Significant Price Increase

What Matters Today: DeepSeek Plans Significant Price Increase , Disappointing TMT Earnings, Questions on the Coordinated Yen Intervention, Bans on Exports of Copper Concentrate - 6Aug26

1) DeepSeek Plans Significant Price Increase

In a notice posted on Thursday, DeepSeek did not specify the exact increases, other than to call them substantial and urge users to plan accordingly. The Hangzhou-based company currently charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens — measures of work an AI model does to digest information and produce results — for its V4 Flash.

Whereas Chinese rival Moonshot prices its Kimi K3 at $3 and $15 per million of each token type. Anthropic’s state-of-the-art Fable 5 service sets that pricing at $10 and $50, respectively.

DeepSeek is in the middle of a massive fundraising and has begun preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, Bloomberg has reported.

Personally, I find this somewhat surprising given lower cost models are the strategy from China, but also their cost was WAY too low and new data center investments do require a ton of capital. Having said that, I think it does bring some relief to the leading LLMs that this is a costly business and pricing tokens at 1/70th of the price from Fable 5 is not sustainable.

Nasdaq -60bps as disappointing earnings in both Semis & Software look to weigh on broader Tech today.

Within Semis, SNDK trading -11% and WDC -15% despite numbers that were generally above the street but missed high buyside expectations (lateral moves: Hynix -7%, Samsung -5%, STX -5%, MU -5%).

In Software/Internet, some BIG moves lower on disappointing earnings, including HUBS -23% on guidance cut, DDOG -18% on an expectations miss (stock at all-time-high’s into the print), APP -19% on Revenue miss, and Z -11% on Q3 guide below … while U +15% and DASH +2% on better results.

Big focus today on SPCX first IPO lockup expiry today (already 32mn shares on the tape). (TY Peter Bartlett)

3) Questions on the Coordinated Yen Intervention

The coordinated FX intervention represented a strong policy step towards stabilizing the Yen. That said, this intervention will likely only be a temporary, albeit significant, reprieve if it is not reinforced by a material change in the global growth outlook or domestic policy mix. We address a number of common questions on the market dynamics around Japan and US intervention. In general, we think investors are overly concerned about policy constraints and disruptions to Treasury market functioning. We think there are interesting signals in the Treasury’s decision to transact in EUR/JPY and encouraging the use of the Fed’s FIMA facility—these two policies together represent an effort to maximize the effects on the Yen and minimize the effects on US Treasuries and the US Dollar.

We are skeptical that Treasury’s involvement is a harbinger of more significant domestic policy changes in Japan. We think it is much more likely that Treasury sees this as a low-cost option to work with Japanese officials to help minimize the potential for unwelcome volatility in the US Treasury market, rather than taking a strong view on the Yen.