Eyeing Higher Margins, AWS and Other Cloud Providers Embrace DeepSeek

The DeepSeek reasoning artificial intelligence, R1, isn’t just a gift to businesses eager to cut their AI costs. American cloud providers looking to boost their server rental businesses moved quickly last week to make R1 available to their customers.

So far, however, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google aren’t charging cloud customers to use DeepSeek, which is open source, the same way they charge for other models—based on how much text the models generate. Instead, businesses using DeepSeek only pay for the computing resources they use.