If Opus was 10x larger than the chinese models, then Google Vertex/Amazon Bedrock would serve it 10x slower than Deepseek/Kimi/etc.
That's not the case. They're in the same order of magnitude of speed.
It could still be 10x larger overall, though that would not make it 10x more expensive.
That's how you get Llama 4.
Pretty much every major lab settled on ~3-5% sparsity for a reason.
According to OpenRouter, AWS serves the latest Opus and Sonnet at roughly the same speed. It's likely that they simply allocate hardware differently per model.
Note that Opus 4.5 is about 1/3 the size of Opus 4/4.1 (and 1/3 the price in the API)
Which seems to be the case, seeing how hungry the industry lately has been for hard drives.