DeepSeek Nears 80B RMB Funding Round Led by Tencent and CATL
DeepSeek is reportedly finalizing a funding round of at least 80 billion RMB (potentially reaching nearly 100 billion RMB), heavily backed by Tencent and battery maker CATL. The capital will support building a massive data center in Inner Mongolia with at least 160,000 Huawei AI chips and prepare the company for a planned IPO in early 2027. This massive round underscores high investor confidence in DeepSeek's open-source AI models, especially following the release of its cost-efficient V4-Flash model. Furthermore, building a compute cluster around 160,000 Huawei chips highlights the growing push toward domestic hardware autonomy within China's AI ecosystem. Beyond hardware deployment, DeepSeek has co-developed AI chip programming software with Huawei to deepen low-level integration with domestic AI accelerators. Founder Liang Wenfeng reiterated that DeepSeek will continue to champion open-source AI and prioritize reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) over immediate commercialization.
## BACKGROUND
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab incubated by quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, known for producing competitive open-weights LLMs at significantly lower costs than Western peers. Amid US tech export restrictions on advanced chips, Chinese AI developers are increasingly collaborating with domestic semiconductor suppliers like Huawei to power large-scale training and inference setups.