Overview
- Reports on Tuesday say DeepSeek is close to closing a pre‑IPO funding round variously estimated at about $12 billion to at least 80–100 billion yuan, with final terms not yet public.
- The talks imply a pre‑money valuation near 500 billion yuan, a leap from the firm’s earlier private rounds and a key test of how Chinese AI companies will be priced.
- Major corporate investors including Tencent and battery maker CATL are reported to be among the largest backers, and CITIC Securities has been named as lead underwriter as the company restructures for an IPO.
- DeepSeek says it has about a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate and high API margins, and it plans to run large clusters of domestic Huawei accelerators at a new Inner Mongolia data centre to avoid reliance on U.S. chips.
- If the round closes at reported size, it would both bankroll DeepSeek’s rapid expansion and serve as a bellwether for capital flows into China’s AI sector and the wider market response to supply‑chain shifts.