Deepseek nears $12 billion round, with CATL and Tencent in

The scale of the round is the story. Deepseek set out to raise roughly $7.5 billion at a valuation of about $75 billion, and Bloomberg reports the total could approach $15 billion — with CATL and Tencent, a battery maker and an internet company, taking the largest shares. That is a notable turn for a round that had been paused after founder Liang Wenfeng's comments about the company's reliance on Nvidia chips went viral, and it follows June's first external round at about $7.4 billion with a valuation above $50 billion.

The money is meant to fund more than models. Deepseek is building a data center with at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei, and it is working on its own inference chip to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and Huawei. Liang also wants to keep developing open models with freely available weights, and the company released V4-Pro and V4-Flash as preview versions in April. Bloomberg links the strong investor interest to V4-Flash, which it says has set new benchmarks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI.

What the outcome hinges on, for both the backers and the company, is whether the round actually closes near the higher end and whether that valuation holds once Deepseek moves to restructure for an IPO in early 2027. The presence of CATL and Tencent suggests cautious corporate interest rather than a purely financial bet, since neither has described its terms and CATL declined to comment. If the round closes high, it would mark a substantial step up from June's round; if it falls short, the earlier pause may prove to have been more than a pause.