Physix FrontierPhysix Frontier · News Briefing Card (TMTPost · Oct 3, 2026)
AI appliance market shifts to lightweight models as full-size shipments fall
KEY FACTS
- Around the 2025 Spring Festival, DeepSeek R1 went viral, and more than 60 vendors launched DeepSeek appliances.
- Full-size appliances sold for 1.2 million to 1.5 million yuan, while domestic-chip dual-machine setups carried budgets of nearly 4 million yuan.
- In the second half of 2025, full-size sales declined, and small and mid-sized vendors shifted their main focus to 32B and 70B models.
- In 2026, memory, storage, and GPU chip prices rose, and disposing of used appliances could recover costs.
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was released with 552B total parameters, below R1's 671B.
KEY DATA
1.2M-1.5M yuanFull-size appliance price
nearly 4M yuanDomestic-chip dual-machine budget
552BDeepSeek V4.1 Flash parameters
671BDeepSeek R1 parameters
PHYSIX OBSERVATION
The appliance market is shifting from parameter competition to deployment competition. Full-size machines are retreating to compliance-driven demand, while lightweight AI BOXes drive volume, showing that customers care more about real-world scenarios than the largest models. Rising hardware prices have made early purchases unexpectedly retain value, but used equipment has poor compatibility and struggles to support new models. Vendors' competitive focus will shift to inference frameworks, model adaptation, and operations services.
Source: TMTPost report