DeepSeek Platform: China's AI Challenger Rewrites the Rules

The article is written and saved to src/content/drafts/news/deepseek-platform-v4-the-api-price-war-goes-nuclear.md.

Here’s what it covers:

• Current platform state — V3.2, R2, and OCR 2 with context caching (74% cost reduction on cached prefixes)
• V4 as the main event — 1T parameter MoE, 37B active, 1M token context, multimodal, 81% SWE-bench, three modes (Fast/Expert/Vision), ~$0.30/$0.50 per million tokens
• The Huawei Ascend chip angle — why running V4 on Huawei hardware matters both geopolitically and for infrastructure resilience
• Honest audience segmentation — who should be evaluating this seriously (cost-sensitive devs, startups) and where it’s complicated (regulated enterprise data)
• Competitor comparison — GPT-4o series, Gemini Flash, Claude Haiku/Sonnet, each given an honest treatment
• A straight verdict — technically compelling, geopolitical risk is real and shouldn’t be hand-waved either direction

Runs about 1,200 words. The Huawei hardware angle ended up being the sharpest differentiator — it’s the detail that turns this from “cheap API” into a story about whether US export controls are actually working.