Beijing AI bar that offers unlimited free DeepSeek coding tokens with $1.50 drink haemorrhaging cash — 'the bar is completely losing money, ' owner admits
An AI-themed bar in Beijing's Zhongguancun tech hub hands out free, unlimited DeepSeek tokens with its drinks, running inference locally on two Nvidia DGX Spark mini-PCs.
An AI bar in Beijing's Zhongguancun tech hub is hemorrhaging cash by offering free DeepSeek tokens with drinks, according to its owner. Song De, an independent AI developer, opened the AGI Bar last year on Inno Way, a startup street in the Haidian district, with the goal of supporting the local AI community. The bar's signature drink, AGI, comes with free access to the house AI agent, which can be used by anyone on the hotel's WiFi.
Song admits the bar is losing money, with ten times more drinks given away than sold. The venue, located near Tsinghua and Peking universities and the Beijing offices of DeepSeek and Microsoft, has hosted parties for Chinese AI labs. DeepSeek's V3 and R1 models, weighing in at 671 billion parameters and 1.6 trillion parameters, respectively, are the main attraction, though the bar uses a distilled or aggressively quantized version of the models rather than the full ones.
The bar's hardware, including two Nvidia DGX Spark mini-PCs with 20-core Arm CPUs and Blackwell GPUs, costs around $9,400, despite DeepSeek suspending its second fundraising round in July due to financial struggles.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
