More American Businesses Are Using DeepSeek Than Expected

DeepSeek has emerged as one of the fastest-growing software vendors among businesses on Ramp’s spend management platform in June 2026, according to new data from Ramp Economics Lab. 

The Chinese AI company topped Ramp’s monthly list of vendors showing breakout growth relative to their existing market share, ahead of event management platform PheedLoop, inference providers Fireworks AI and fal AI, software design tool Paper, and GPU cloud provider Vast.ai.

The ranking is based on transaction data from more than 50,000 businesses using Ramp’s corporate card and bill-pay platform. 

Ramp said the growth reflects companies actively paying DeepSeek directly rather than merely running open-source versions of its models on their own infrastructure.

“Firms are sending and receiving data through DeepSeek directly,” wrote Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian. “To be clear: this is not just self-hosted open source usage.” 

Kharazian also adds that he didn’t expect American firms to use DeepSeek.

“In probably the biggest sign that companies are looking for cheaper alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, some are willing to use cheaper, Chinese models, sending U.S. data back and forth from China-hosted servers,” he wrote in a post on X. 

DeepSeek previously experienced a brief surge in adoption before the adoption rate fell back. According to Ramp's AI Index, the company reached roughly 0.3% business adoption before declining to 0.1%. The latest spending data suggests renewed interest from US companies despite ongoing scrutiny around Chinese AI providers and data security.

“American model companies should take note of this competitive pressure anyway, via cheaper models or smart routing to help firms better manage spiralling AI spend,” adds Kharazian. 

The broader rankings point to growing enterprise demand for open-source AI infrastructure. 

Three model-serving and inference platforms—Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra—appeared among the top-trending vendors, suggesting businesses are increasingly deploying open-source models rather than relying exclusively on proprietary offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Anthropic led Ramp’s separate ranking of fastest-growing vendors by market-share growth, followed by AI note-taking startup Granola, developer platforms Vercel and Netlify, Canva, Grammarly, Figma, Perplexity AI, Tailscale and Higgsfield AI.

The data also suggests that AI adoption has not displaced several established software categories. Design platforms Paper and Figma both appeared in the rankings, while web infrastructure providers Vercel and Netlify continued to post strong growth among Ramp customers.