DeepSeek Is Cheap, Powerful — and Increasingly Hard for Europe to Touch DeepSeek has become the model European teams want to test for cost and performance reasons, just as privacy regulators make direct use of the Chinese app much harder to justify. ## Europe now has two DeepSeek stories at once There is the consumer-app story, which is rapidly becoming a regulatory problem, and the model story, which is becoming harder for European companies to ignore. On the regulatory side, Italy's privacy watchdog moved early against DeepSeek in January 2025, blocking the app over data-protection concerns after asking how Italian users' data was being collected and processed. That mattered because Europe had already seen this pattern with ChatGPT: once one major regulator moves, every legal, compliance, and procurement team in the bloc starts paying attention. On the commercial side, the opposite dynamic kicked in. DeepSeek's R1 model spread fast…