What Bloomberg reported
DeepSeek is close to closing at least 80 billion yuan — about $11.93 billion — in its latest funding round, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters carried the story but noted it could not independently verify the figures, and DeepSeek, Tencent, and CATL did not respond to requests for comment. File this as a well-sourced report rather than a done deal.
The striking part is the delta. DeepSeek originally set out to raise roughly 50 billion yuan. Investor demand pushed the target up, and the final figure could approach 100 billion yuan — nearly $15 billion. Asking for seven billion and being handed twelve is not ordinary fundraising. It is what happens when a financing exercise overlaps with a national priority.
Follow the check writers
The headline number is less interesting than who is writing it. Tencent and CATL — the battery maker, not a cloud company — have committed among the largest amounts. Both were already inside DeepSeek's June round, which raised roughly $7.4 billion at a valuation around $74 billion, with founder Liang Wenfeng contributing the largest share himself.
The context around this round is silicon, not software. Last month DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, pitched on faster inference and higher throughput. It also partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools optimized for Huawei's Ascend AI chips. Put those two facts next to a $12 billion war chest, and the shape of the bet is visible: an end-to-end Chinese AI stack that does not pass through Nvidia.
What comes next
Reuters reported last month that DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare a potential STAR Market listing in Shanghai, with timing and size still undecided. A $12 billion private raise ahead of an IPO is unusual sequencing. It lets DeepSeek set its valuation privately before public markets get a say, and it buys enough compute runway that IPO timing becomes a choice rather than a need.
The open questions are the ones no sourced report answers yet: the valuation this round implies, how the money gets deployed, and whether "close to securing" turns into closed. DeepSeek has a habit of moving fast and saying little. For now, the fundraising numbers are doing the talking.
Sources
- [1] Reuters — “DeepSeek to raise at least $12 billion in Tencent-backed funding, Bloomberg News reports” (Oct 6, 2026)Read source
- [2] TechStartups — “DeepSeek nears $7.4 billion funding round at $74 billion valuation ahead of 2027 IPO” (Aug 28, 2026)Read source