I'm European and I am developing a model that's 20% worse and 0.001x the cost of Chinese models.

Personally I also always just use Gemini-3.5-Flash since for me it's actually a good search tool access that makes a model great.

But I'm not very typical European we have 2000x B300 and I'm in USA and China all the time, and work 16hrs a day without weekends and holidays.