I mean what other competitively similar AI models are there? DeepSeek is nowhere near. Are there others?

The short answer is No.

There are "sovereign" clouds like StackIT, OVH, OTC or Scaleway. What they all have in common is that they are lightyears behind hyperscalers in terms of performance, reliability and security. Needless to say, these alternatives can only serve open-source models because they are not capable of training a SOTA equivalent by themselves. The cherry on top is that you have to pay a sovereignty premium for inferior performance.

Local DeepSeek, qwen or kimi models are far better privacy-wise, faster, but much more expensive (to get a 2TB GPU RAM cluster). So everybody went with the Claude, OpenAI or CoPilot business contracts, so their secret business data leaves the EU, but will not be used to train the model. Unlike with the cloud Chinese services.

I use DeepSeek and GLM for coding. They are on-par or better than Opus/Astra.

You can use Deepseek from EU-only hosters. DS is openweight.