More US firms turn to China’s DeepSeek over pricey Silicon Valley AI

According to a “trending software vendors” list from New York-based corporate spending platform Ramp – which tracks when businesses buy from a software vendor for the first time – DeepSeek’s rise placed it ahead of event-management platform PheedLoop and open-source model-serving platform Fireworks AI.

Notably, US firms were making direct payments to DeepSeek, suggesting they were sending and receiving data directly through DeepSeek rather than hosting its open-source models on their own internal servers, said Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab, in the report on Wednesday.

“In probably the biggest sign that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, some are willing to use cheaper, Chinese models, sending US data back and forth from China-hosted servers,” Kharazian said in a social media post.

This was not DeepSeek’s first increase in popularity.

Kharazian noted that DeepSeek “enjoyed a modest hype cycle” in January 2025, when US corporate adoption ticked up to 0.3 per cent before receding to 0.1 per cent, according to the Ramp AI Index.

By this April, DeepSeek’s adoption rate still hovered at 0.1 per cent. For context, market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI dominated the index at 34.4 per cent and 32.3 per cent, respectively. Ramp did not provide the market share percentages for June.