... in the same way a lot of website in this world 'shared user data' with Google.

Through Google Analytics.

Yeah, believe it or not. ByteDance has a cloud offering. And it includes a frontend APM product. And DeepSeek used that. How surprising! A Chinese company used a Chinese cloud.

Oh, and chat.deepseek.com resolve to a Huawei Cloud IP address in China. It resolves to Cloudflare outside of mainland China, but who knows, maybe they just decided to wrap with another CDN and their servers are still on Huawei Cloud. So they sent data to Huawei, too. I repeat, H-U-A-W-E-I. That cursed telecom equipment company in the States.