DeepSeek, the lab that made cheap Chinese AI a global story, is about to become one of the best-funded AI companies in China, and the money is coming mostly from the state and from industry. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday 6 October that DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan (about $12 billion), with Tencent and battery maker CATL among the largest backers. Reuters confirmed the 80-billion-yuan-plus figure through its own source. CNBC’s sources say the round could grow to as much as 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion), double the original target.
What’s been reported
- Valuation: DeepSeek is seeking about 500 billion yuan ($75 billion), according to both Reuters and CNBC. CNBC says an investor filing from the first round implied about 350 billion yuan.
- Round history: DeepSeek’s first external round closed in June and raised about 50 billion yuan (around $7.4 billion). Reuters says this second round started in July. CNBC says it was originally meant to close by the end of August but slipped because some investors balked at the price. Reuters’ sources now expect it to wrap up in October.
- Who’s in: CNBC names CATL, Geely Auto, Monolith Management and Loyal Valley Capital as having committed. It also says DeepSeek is turning away private funds raised from individual investors and keeping the round largely to government and corporate money.
- IPO: Bloomberg says DeepSeek plans to restructure for a listing in early 2027. Reuters previously reported that CITIC Securities has been hired to prepare a possible listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market.
- Compute: The Decoder’s write-up of the Bloomberg story says DeepSeek is building a data centre with at least 160,000 Huawei AI chips. It also says founder Liang Wenfeng wants to keep releasing open-weight models.
None of the companies commented. As always with a round that hasn’t closed, the final number can still move.
Why a search site cares about a funding round
We cover DeepSeek on ReadIsi because in China it isn’t just a model. It’s a place where people ask questions and get answers instead of a results page. QuestMobile data had DeepSeek holding third place in China’s AI apps while Alibaba’s Qwen surged. A round of this size means that answer surface isn’t going away. DeepSeek can now afford to compete on reach as well as on benchmark charts.
The open-weights point matters as much as the money. DeepSeek’s models run inside other companies’ products. Alibaba Cloud added DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash to its Token Plan last month. That’s the same model DeepSeek’s own API docs now use to serve requests sent to the retired V4 Flash model names, after the Flash-over-flagship shake-up we covered last month. If Liang keeps the weights open, a well-funded DeepSeek pushes cheap, capable models into the chatbots, search assistants and agents that Chinese users actually reach your content through.
Then there’s the hardware. A 160,000-chip Huawei build follows DeepSeek open-sourcing Ascend tooling with Huawei. China’s AI search stack is being built on domestic chips, so Western platform policy has less leverage over it every quarter. Brands treating China AI visibility as a side project should notice that.
Our take
The detail I’d watch isn’t the headline number. It’s who DeepSeek is letting in. CNBC says retail-style money is being kept out and state-backed and corporate funds are being let in. Add a planned STAR Market listing and DeepSeek starts to look less like a scrappy research lab and more like national AI infrastructure with a public share price.
That has consequences. Listed companies have to show revenue, and the obvious ways to make money from a consumer answer engine are subscriptions, ads or commerce. Moonshot, which CNBC says is also eyeing an early-2027 IPO, will face the same pressure.
For marketers, that’s the real story. Today DeepSeek is an answer engine with no ad slots. Within a couple of years of a listing, I wouldn’t bet on that lasting. Get your brand cited in DeepSeek answers now, while citations are the only thing on offer, and keep an eye on our DeepSeek archive for the first sign of something sponsored.