That is a very good question. It is open source / open weight - yet none of the third party providers, that also host Deepsek, seem to be able to match Deepseek itself on price.

My guess is that they do aggressive caching / some proprietary optimizations in their hosting setup that they haven't published. Maybe also running at loss to gain market share.

And judging from latency / network performance, I don't think what you access, when you access deepseek.com from Europe, is hosted in China.