Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is closing in on one of the largest private financings in the history of the AI industry. Bloomberg reported this week that the company is set to raise at least 80 billion yuan — roughly $11.9 billion — with the final tally possibly reaching 100 billion yuan, as it builds a war chest ahead of a domestic initial public offering. Reuters confirmed the outline of the deal with a person familiar with the matter, though the agency noted it could not independently verify the figures and that DeepSeek, Tencent, and CATL did not respond to requests for comment.
The fundraising began in July, targeting a valuation of 500 billion yuan — about $74 billion — and follows DeepSeek's maiden external round of roughly $7.4 billion in June. According to the reports, investor demand has pushed committed capital well past the company's original 50 billion yuan target, with Tencent and battery giant CATL writing some of the largest checks. Sources expect the round to wrap up in October.
If completed at these levels, the raise would rank among the biggest private AI financings ever recorded. It is also a sign of how quickly capital is concentrating: a handful of labs and companies are absorbing the lion's share of new money, and a growing portion of that money is now flowing through China's domestic markets rather than Silicon Valley.
The geopolitical backdrop matters here. DeepSeek recently partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools optimized for Huawei's Ascend AI chips — a move that highlights China's broader push to build an AI stack that depends less on Nvidia's hardware and software ecosystem. The company also released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash last month, a model it says delivers greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput, and the ability to scale to larger models. DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, though Reuters reported the timing, valuation, and size of any IPO remain undecided.
A word of discipline on the numbers: every figure above is reported, not confirmed. Private-market fundraising details rest on anonymous sources, and DeepSeek itself has said nothing. But the sourcing chain — Bloomberg's original report, corroborated by Reuters' own sourcing — is about as solid as private-market reporting gets. The direction of travel is unmistakable: the next phase of the AI race is being financed at a scale that would have seemed implausible two years ago, and an increasing share of it is being underwritten in Hangzhou rather than the Valley.