The Zhitong Finance App learned that, according to media reports quoting people familiar with the matter, DeepSeek's latest round of financing is close to locking in at least 12 billion US dollars (80 billion yuan) of investment, which greatly exceeds the company's original financing target, laying the foundation for an initial public offering scheduled for early 2027.
People familiar with the matter revealed that Ningde Times and Tencent are among the leading investors, and the financing is coming to an end. DeepSeek initially sought financing of around RMB 50 billion, but after the successful launch of the latest AI model, investor interest surpassed expectations. According to the signed investment terms and conditions, the final financing scale is likely to be close to 100 billion yuan.
DeepSeek completed the first round of financing in June of this year. The total amount of financing reached 51 billion yuan, and the post-investment valuation was nearly 400 billion yuan, setting a record for the highest single round of financing in the domestic AI industry. According to public information, the round of financing was led by founder Liang Wenfeng. Industries such as Tencent, Ningde Era, NetEase, JD, and IDG Capital and top financial capital participated in the joint investment, and the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund followed the strategy of the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.
According to the report, DeepSeek's newly released v4 Flash has redefined the market's expectations for the cost performance ratio of AI models and poses a challenge to American AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Since launching a product capable of similar models in Silicon Valley at a lower cost in 2025, founder Liang Wenfeng's startup has quickly built a reputation through technological breakthroughs.
Like other AI companies, DeepSeek needs to invest huge sums of money to support its development in the field of artificial intelligence. The company plans to deploy at least 160,000 high-end Huawei AI accelerators in large-scale data centers built in Inner Mongolia, which may form one of the largest known Huawei AI chip clusters. DeepSeek also officially open-sourced infrastructure components for Huawei's AI chip computing power platform.