DeepSeek costs a fraction of what Claude or GPT charge per token — sometimes ninety times less. That's why Chinese open-weight AI models have quietly become a serious enterprise option, not just a curiosity. But cheap doesn't mean risk-free: from data residency to model behaviour, self-hosting solves some problems and not others. Here's how businesses are actually navigating the trade-off — and what Singapore's regulators expect you to show for it.