One of the fascinating dynamics around Chinese open-weights models is the competition among American (and some European) inference providers to deliver the best inference performance on them. They've increasingly beaten the Chinese model makers themselves on inference throughput and latency.

Together.ai, Baseten, and others have already achieved higher throughput, lower latency, and lower E2E latency for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 than DeepSeek's own inference service.

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017

That’s just likely the NVDA chip ban at play. I wouldn’t bet on that being an enduring truth