(Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that’s been shocking the AI industry, has seen its web traffic surge from a mere 280,000 visitors all the way to 6.2 million.
The data comes from traffic monitoring service Similarweb, which has been tracking daily visits to DeepSeek.com. The site was previously receiving about 200,000 to 300,000 visits per day. But after DeepSeek released V3 of its AI chatbot on December 26th, visits to the site have been tripling and septupling, crossing 1 million and 2 million visits.
Worldwide daily visits to DeepSeek.com then began reaching 3.1 million on January 15th before surging to 4 million, and then 5 million last week — right as word began to circulate that DeepSeek’s chatbot showed it could blow a hole in the US’s AI market. On Friday, January 24th, traffic to the site then reached 6.2 million, according to Similarweb’s latest tally.
(Similarweb)The number is far behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, which was able to attract over 100 million user visits in a single day starting last year. Still, visits to DeepSeek.com and the mobile app almost certainly exploded even more on Monday when US tech stocks took a dive on the apparent implications of the Chinese company’s AI tech. That’s because DeepSeek has developed two open source and high-quality AI models, V3 and R1, which can be run using far less GPU compute power, drastically reducing the cost and energy needs for generative AI.
Hence, the US might not need to spend tens of billions of dollars on power-hungry data centers and energy plants to train and run future generations of AI — thereby dealing a blow to the business models of Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft and others. “Turning up mothballed nuclear power plants was never going to be the answer. There is so much opportunity to improve the efficiency of AI,” tweeted Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince.
The interest in DeepSeek may have also caused hackers to launch a DDoS attack against the company’s site. On Monday morning, the Chinese company "temporarily" blocked some access to new users, citing “large-scale malicious attacks” on the DeepSeek.com domain.
As a result, the restriction might deter continued traffic to the site, although DeepSeek says existing users can continue to log in. Still, the company appears to be loosening the limitation when before it said only new users possessing a China-based +86 phone numbers could access the site. DeepSeek.com now just says: "Registration may be busy. Please wait and try again."