Deepseek, the Chinese AI startup, is close to raising at least $12 billion in a new funding round, Bloomberg reports. The company originally aimed to raise about $7.5 billion at a valuation of roughly $75 billion. People familiar with the matter say the total could approach $15 billion.
Battery maker CATL and Tencent are contributing the largest shares to the round. The strong investor interest stems from Deepseek's V4-Flash model, which has set new benchmarks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI.
Deepseek is building a data center with at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei. Founder Liang Wenfeng wants to keep developing open models with freely available weights. The company is also working on its own inference chip to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and Huawei.
"After the round closes, Deepseek plans to restructure for an IPO in early 2027," said Liang Wenfeng, founder of Deepseek. The restructuring is part of the company's strategy to prepare for a public offering.
The announcement follows Deepseek's first external funding round in June, which closed at about $7.4 billion with a valuation above $50 billion. The company released V4-Pro and V4-Flash as preview versions in April.
Deepseek did not say when the restructuring would be finalized, and the company remains focused on reducing its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei. The IPO plans are expected to be announced in the coming months.
Source: thedecoder
