DeepSeek Flash Price Hike Halves Traffic, Leaves ~10T Token Daily Gap

The demand response suggests price elasticity in AI inference is sharper than the sector's growth narrative implies, and the scale of the token gap shows how quickly volume can migrate when pricing shifts. What matters is whether that displaced demand resettles on rival models or simply disappears, since the two imply very different things for compute utilization and token economics. Whether Flash traffic stabilizes after the hike is the open question.