[SMM Computing Power Flash] Short-Term Rental Demand Faces Scarce Resources, Consider Shifting to Private Clouds with Classified Information Processing Qualifications

SMM learned from practitioners at well-known cloud platforms that in early 2026, investment mainly went into building data center-grade GPU servers for leasing. Affected by July's GPU price increases, they have turned to subleasing, and new investment has shifted to RTX 5060 and RTX 5070 for cloud gaming. Currently, RTX graphics card prices continue to rise moderately, with brand-new boxed RTX 5060 cards with a three-year warranty quoted at 2,900–2,950 yuan per card. SMM believes that GPU price increases have driven the supply side of computing power leasing toward subleasing, accelerating the penetration of consumer-grade cards into cloud gaming.

Computing power rental prices moved sideways today, with monthly rental and per-card-hour quotes for all models unchanged, mainly because no new resources were released into the market. Meanwhile, DeepSeek announced that it raised V4 series API pricing and introduced differentiated peak/off-peak pricing. Cached input pricing saw significant increases, well beyond the range of cost increases, signaling a pattern of testing the market with higher prices while leaving room for future anchoring. Frontline token businesses face a single pricing source and limited bargaining power, and need to closely monitor token price trends.

SMM has learned that starting at 00:00 on August 17, 2026, DeepSeek will implement new DeepSeek-V4 API pricing. V4-Flash and V4-Pro will be charged at different rates during peak and off-peak periods, with peak periods from 9:00 to 12:00 and from 14:00 to 18:00 Beijing time. Compared with the previous flat pricing, V4-Flash cached input will rise from 0.02 yuan to 0.05 yuan per million tokens (off-peak) or 0.1 yuan (peak); uncached input will rise from 1 yuan to 1.5 yuan or 3 yuan; and output will rise from 2 yuan to 4.5 yuan or 9 yuan. For V4-Pro, cached input will rise from 0.025 yuan to 0.15 yuan or 0.3 yuan; uncached input will rise from 3 yuan to 4.5 yuan or 9 yuan; and output will rise from 6 yuan to 13.5 yuan or 27 yuan. SMM believes that Pro cached input, which will see the largest increase in this round and whose marginal cost is almost zero, will reach 500% during off-peak hours alone, clearly exceeding the range of cost-driven increases. The simultaneous introduction of peak-valley differential pricing is characterized by testing the market with high prices and leaving room for maneuver in anchoring future prices.