Beijing AI Bar Loses Money Offering Free DeepSeek Coding Tokens with Drinks

AI Bar's Business Model

The AGI Bar, located in Beijing's Zhongguancun tech hub, provides free, unlimited DeepSeek coding tokens to customers who purchase drinks. The bar's signature drink, also named AGI, costs 9.9 yuan ($1.50). This offering allows anyone on the bar's WiFi to use its house AI agent without charge.

Financial Challenges

Song De, the independent AI developer and owner of AGI Bar, has admitted that the bar is "completely losing money." He noted that roughly ten times more drinks are given away than sold, indicating a significant financial drain from the free AI token service. The bar's operations are largely automated, with AI agents managing inventory, reservations, and memberships, and humanoid robots are planned for later this year.

Hardware and AI Models

The bar utilizes two Nvidia DGX Spark mini-PCs for local inference, each featuring a 20-core Arm CPU and a Blackwell GPU with 128GB of unified LPDDR5X. These units, costing about $9,400 for a pair, are capable of handling models up to 200 billion parameters at FP4. However, DeepSeek's larger models, such as V3 and R1 (671 billion parameters) and V4 (1.6 trillion parameters), require a distilled or aggressively quantized version to run on the bar's hardware.

DeepSeek's Fundraising Pause

DeepSeek recently suspended its second fundraising round, which aimed for a pre-money valuation of approximately 480 billion yuan (about $71 billion). This suspension occurred shortly after remarks attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng circulated on Chinese social media. These remarks reportedly discussed DeepSeek's reliance on Nvidia chips and estimated China's AI development to be 12 to 18 months behind leading U.S. labs, with only about one-twentieth of their compute resources.