DeepSeek-R1, a private and secure deep learning model, is now in production in US and EU data centers, challenging the assumption that training massive closed-source models like GPT-4o and o1 is a sustainable moat. The sudden advent of open-source models with strong benchmarks compared to OpenAI’s latest offerings signals a future where every business can have its own high-performance foundation models. Companies face three options for how they’ll respond to this shift: staying on OpenAI/Anthropic, switching to DeepSeek on a shared API endpoint, or running DeepSeek-R1 on a dedicated deployment, which requires a major engineering effort but offers the only viable option due to massive security and compliance risks of shared endpoints. Baseten is uniquely positioned to help companies take advantage of DeepSeek without the typical roadblocks by providing dedicated deployments on their multi-cloud infrastructure, supporting high-performance multi-node inference, and offering enterprise-grade performance with custom optimizations on top of fast inference frameworks.