Deepseek set out to raise roughly $7.5 billion. According to Bloomberg, the company is now nearing at least $12 billion, and people familiar with the matter said the round could end up close to $15 billion.
That is a big jump for a single round. Even the original target carried a valuation of about $75 billion.
A battery giant and a gaming giant write the biggest checks
Two of the backers are not a surprise. Tencent and battery maker CATL are putting in the largest amounts.
None of the three companies would discuss the deal. CATL declined to comment, and neither Tencent nor Deepseek responded.
Investor interest comes down to one model. Deepseek’s V4-Flash has set new marks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI. Investors should be clear about what they are buying, though. V4-Pro and V4-Flash came out in April as preview versions, not finished products.
The round almost didn’t happen
The deal ran into trouble earlier this year. Deepseek paused the round after remarks by founder Liang Wenfeng about the company’s reliance on Nvidia chips went viral.
The valuation has climbed fast in just a few months. In June, Deepseek closed its first external funding round, raising about $7.4 billion at a valuation above $50 billion. The new round could bring in roughly twice that.
Huawei chips now, its own chips later
Deepseek is clearly working to move past the Nvidia question. It is building a data center that will hold at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei.
Huawei is not the long-term answer either. Deepseek is also developing its own inference chip so it relies less on both Nvidia and Huawei.
Next stop, the public markets
Once the round closes, Deepseek plans to restructure ahead of an IPO in early 2027.
Liang wants Deepseek to keep releasing open models with freely available weights. If you have ever downloaded a Deepseek model, this is the promise to keep an eye on. Liang says the core product will stay free while he asks investors for as much as $15 billion.