SHANGHAI, Sept. 26 -- Liang Wenfeng told investors this week what the quarterly filings of his American rivals have yet to demonstrate: that a frontier artificial intelligence model can generate genuine money at extraordinary margins, even in a market that spent most of 2026 debating whether any of these companies would ever turn a profit.

DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based startup that rattled Silicon Valley in January when it released a capable reasoning model at a reported training cost of roughly $6 million, has more than doubled its annualized revenue run rate to approximately $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter briefed on remarks Wenfeng made at a recent investor meeting. Seeking Alpha reported the figures on Thursda...