Chinese artificial intelligence startup Deepseek is closing in on raising at least $12 billion in a massive new funding round, with backing from battery maker CATL and technology giant Tencent. The financing effort initially aimed for roughly $7.5 billion at a $75 billion valuation, but strong investor interest driven by the performance of the V4-Flash model could push the final total toward $15 billion.
Following the completion of this investment round, Deepseek plans to restructure for an initial public offering in early 2027. Founder Liang Wenfeng intends to continue developing open models with freely available weights while the company builds a new data center equipped with at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei. The startup is also developing its own inference chip to reduce reliance on foreign and domestic hardware suppliers like Nvidia and Huawei.
This major funding surge highlights growing investor confidence in competitive Chinese AI infrastructure and cost-efficient frontier models.