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
Yes, sorry, I was being maximally-broad in my comment but I would think it's very, very, very likely that OpenAI is currently charging huge margins and markups to help maintain the cachet / exclusivity / and, in some senses, safety of their service. Charging more money for access to their models feels like a pretty big part of their moat.
Also possibly b/c of their sweetheart deal with Azure they've never needed to negotiate enterprise pricing so they're probably calculating margins based on GPU list prices or something insane like that.
[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