There are even much cheaper services that host it for only slightly more than deepseek itself [1]. I'm now very certain that deepseek is not offering the API at a loss, so either OpenAI has absurd margins or their model is much more expensive.

[1] the cheapest I've found, which also happens to run in the EU, is https://studio.nebius.ai/ at $0.8/million input.

Edit: I just saw that openrouter also now has nebius