[AINews] DeepSeek DeepInfer: Open Source SOTA Inference running 155T toks/day/cluster making $22m/day at ~80% margin for a 81 day payback
DeepSeek released DeepInfer, its production inference stack built on vLLM with speculative decoding, SWA Bounded Replay and structured output, reporting 155 trillion tokens/day from one cluster, 96% input-cache hits, 400 ms average time to first token and $38 revenue per accelerator-hour at off-peak prices. The release excludes KV-cache management and load balancing, which remain coupled to internal infrastructure, and vLLM reported decode throughput within 6% of DeepInfer's published results on GB200 under a matched configuration. Community margin estimates of roughly 80% depend on a cache-heavy token mix and omit costs such as SSD cache, networking and idle capacity, so the figures are first-party production claims rather than audited measurements.
Why it matters: Useful for readers tracking open-source inference economics, since it pairs DeepSeek's production claims with vLLM's comparative benchmark and a careful accounting of what the margin figures do and do not include.