Back to News

DeepSeek raises ~$15B in one of China's largest funding rounds; CATL, Tencent among backers

#deepseek#funding#china#ai

Sources report DeepSeek raised approximately 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest funding round, marking one of China's largest ever. CATL and Tencent are among the biggest contributors, according to the report.

Coverage timeline

  1. Techmeme

    Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg : Sources: DeepSeek raised ~$15B in its latest fundraising round, one of China's largest ever, with CATL and Tencent among the biggest contributors — The Chinese AI pioneer DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest fundraising round, one of the country's largest ever …

Related stories

  • DeepSeek nears $12B+ funding round with Tencent, CATL; IPO planned for early 2027

    DeepSeek is close to raising at least $12 billion (80 billion yuan) in a funding round that could reach approximately $14.9 billion, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Tencent and CATL are the biggest contributors, and the round precedes a planned initial public offering in early 2027.

    1 reports · 1 sources
  • DeepSeek open-sources Ascend infrastructure components, partners with Huawei

    DeepSeek announced on September 30 the open-sourcing of infrastructure components for Huawei's Ascend platform, including the TileLang compiler, high-performance computing libraries (DeepGEMM, FlashMLA, TileKernels, DeepSelect), and the DeepEP distributed communication library. Huawei also open-sourced joint innovations around Ascend 950 and supernodes in the CANN community, covering deployment, training, KV cache pooling, and Agentic RL. The move aims to build an efficient AI chip software ecosystem with Huawei, providing developers with tools corresponding to those previously released for GPU platforms.

    3 reports · 3 sources
  • DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer inference stack, reports 82% gross margin

    DeepSeek released its internal inference framework DeepInfer under the Apache 2.0 license, along with the token codec component deepseek-recipe. The framework, which supports DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and targets Nvidia SM100 GPUs and Huawei Ascend 950 NPUs, reportedly achieves a throughput of 155 trillion tokens per day per cluster, with API revenue of $38 per GPU-hour at off-peak pricing, implying a gross margin of 82% after GPU rental costs. The release sparked discussions about the profitability of AI inference services.

    3 reports · 3 sources2303 points · 884 comments
  • DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017 open-weight model with faster, cheaper agent tasks

    DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017, an open-weight model checkpoint with 763B parameters, now live on its website, app, and API. The update claims stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than its predecessor, achieved via reinforcement learning with self-feedback for end-to-end project development. DeepSeek also opened its Search & Fetch APIs to everyone, priced at $0.75 per 1000 successful requests, and requires DeepSeek Harness v0.2.1-rc.1 or later for optimal use.

    9 reports · 6 sources955 points · 717 comments

News updates every hour. Subscribe in your RSS reader to get new stories automatically.

Subscribe