CATL and Tencent back Deepseek's ballooning funding round as the AI startup eyes a 2027 IPO
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Chinese AI startup Deepseek is nearing the completion of a massive funding round that could reach $15 billion, significantly exceeding its initial target of $7.5 billion. Major investors CATL and Tencent are leading contributions to this valuation surge, which reflects strong market confidence in the company's technology. This interest is largely driven by Deepseek's V4-Flash model, which has established new benchmarks for cost-efficiency and performance compared to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Following the closure of this financing, the company intends to restructure its operations with the goal of launching an Initial Public Offering in early 2027. To support its growing infrastructure, Deepseek is constructing a data center equipped with at least 160,000 AI chips from Huawei. Founder Liang Wenfeng remains committed to developing open models with freely available weights, despite previous controversies regarding Nvidia chip reliance. The company is also actively working on its own inference chips to reduce dependence on external hardware suppliers.
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