Deepseek dominates Ramp: Chinese AI attracts US companies

In June 2026, Deepseek emerged as the fastest-growing software provider according to Ramp, a platform that tracks the evolution of enterprise software. Although Deepseek does not compete with Western models in terms of overall performance, its significantly lower cost attracts American companies.

Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp, warns of potential security and competition risks associated with the direct use of Chinese models like Deepseek. Despite these concerns, American companies continue to pay Deepseek directly and send data through its platform. This data encompasses real transactions from over 50,000 companies.

Deepseek launched its V4 version at the end of April, and while it does not match the best Western models, the performance gap is much smaller than the price gap. In January 2025, Deepseek experienced a peak adoption rate of 0.3% among American companies, before dropping back to 0.1%.

Deepseek's breakthrough in May fits into a broader pattern where Chinese models are gaining popularity due to their cost-effectiveness. In December 2025, Chinese models like Deepseek and Alibaba's Qwen accounted for over 44% of downloads of new popular models on Hugging Face, surpassing their American competitors for the first time.

Kharazian notes that cost awareness is likely the main driver behind Deepseek's success. Platforms like Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra are also seeing their popularity grow, as they allow companies to run open-source models at lower costs. These developments indicate the formation of a token economy, where the price-performance ratio becomes crucial. However, Kharazian doubts that this trend of using Chinese models will persist.

Recent debates on the return on investment of AI show that many companies struggle to measure the actual benefits. Meanwhile, model prices have increased across all providers, marking the end of the era of heavily subsidized fixed rates. However, the idea of an "AI-driven SaaS apocalypse" is not supported by Ramp's data. Established tools like Figma and Paper continue to be in demand, despite the rise of new AI products like Anthropic's Claude.