Deepseek prices their models based on a 10 month hardware payback period. They report ~$38 revenue/GPU-hour on V4.1-Flash clusters.
Inference is clearly profitable. The question is whether it's profitable enough to justify the training research costs.
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At best, this tells you v4.1 flash is profitable, but can they really get $38 per gpu hour? Sounds like a lot.
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If they keep it running at near constant usage, you'd only need 80-120 million tokens an hour to hit 38$ of revenue (at off peak pricing, half as much for peak pricing).
V4.1-Flash is probably quite smaller and much more resource effective than the frontier models. Add to that much cheaper energy in China.
Clearly potentially profitable. Not clearly profitable.