DeepSeek is about to become one of the best-funded AI startups on the planet. The Chinese lab is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan, roughly 12 billion dollars, in a funding round backed by Tencent and battery giant CATL, Bloomberg reported October 6, 2026. People familiar with the deal say signed term sheets could push the total toward 100 billion yuan, about 15 billion dollars.
The round has blown past DeepSeek's own expectations. The company began the process seeking roughly 50 billion yuan, but investor demand surged after the release of its V4-Flash model, which has posted cost-and-performance benchmark numbers that stack up against offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. Tencent and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., better known as CATL, are contributing the largest shares, a sign that the investor base now extends well beyond traditional tech venture capital into China's industrial giants.
The money follows momentum. DeepSeek began seeking new capital in July at a targeted valuation of roughly 74 billion dollars, a month after closing its first external round at about 7.4 billion with a valuation above 50 billion. The company recently hit a one billion dollar annualized revenue run rate, more than double its pace from just a few months earlier, as demand for its models and higher prices turned last year's breakout into a real business.
What happens next is equally ambitious. Once the round closes, founder Liang Wenfeng plans to restructure the company for an initial public offering in early 2027, potentially on Shanghai's STAR Market, with CITIC Securities hired to prepare. The company is also building a data center in Inner Mongolia powered by at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei, one of the largest known clusters of Chinese accelerators, and is developing its own inference chips to reduce dependence on both Nvidia and Huawei.
Wenfeng has pledged to keep developing open models with freely available weights while pursuing artificial general intelligence. Paired with Reflection AI's 501-billion-parameter Beam in the United States, DeepSeek's war chest sets up the defining dynamic of the next phase of AI: an open-weight arms race, funded on a scale that would have been unimaginable two years ago, and playing out across two rival chip ecosystems.
