1) China has overinvested in infrastructure and manufacturing capacity to such an extent
that in the aggregate the cost of additional
public sector investment exceeds the present
value of future increases in productivity generated by
the investment
and 2) China's long-term sustainable growth rate is substantially below the economy's current GDP growth target
Why does he make these assumptions without also analyzing the technology improvement aspect? I don't see anything about that in this article.
DeepSeek's official API, which has 10x cheaper cached input cost isn't even on OpenRouter as a provider, so just like Google, most volume is not going through OpenRouter. (Gemini's official hosted api is on OpenRouter BTW)
Also you're comparing an API with Google's internal corporate and consumer app use. Bytedance announced they were using 63T tokens/day (441T / week) at the end of 2025, so they are probably even higher than Google now. We don't know how much weekly tokens the DeepSeek chatapp uses, but it would also be a very high number much higher than OpenRouter tokens.
For the real reason of the recent price drops, go ask your AI about how much it would cost to run DeepSeek V4 or MiMo 2.5 after Ascend 950 PR have started to be mass delivered in 2026 Apr at $10k / card.