DeepSeek nears $12 billion round led by Tencent and CATL, Bloomberg reports
DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, about $12 billion, Bloomberg reports, well past its target and ahead of an early-2027 IPO. Tencent and CATL are reported among the biggest backers.
DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) in its latest funding round, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg's account says the figure blows past the company's own capital-raising target. DeepSeek has not confirmed the numbers, and this paper has not seen the investment terms.
Tencent and the battery maker CATL are among the lead investors, according to summaries of the Bloomberg report carried by Newsquawk and Investing.com. Those summaries say DeepSeek first sought about 50 billion yuan, and that terms already signed could take the final amount close to 100 billion yuan. Bloomberg's full article was behind a paywall when this paper tried to open it.
https://x.com/jukan05/status/2107339415463059669
The raise is the run-up to what Bloomberg calls an initial public offering in early 2027. The summaries say investor interest rose after the launch of DeepSeek's V4 Flash model, and that the company is preparing a possible listing on Shanghai's STAR Market. None of that comes from DeepSeek itself, which had not commented in the coverage read.
The same summaries say the money would help DeepSeek install at least 160,000 Huawei AI accelerators at a data center in Inner Mongolia. That detail rests on secondhand relays of a single Bloomberg report, so treat it as unconfirmed. No other outlet had independently reported the round when this story was filed.