[UPDATE] DeepSeek Closes In on a $15 Billion War Chest

DeepSeek, the Hangzhou lab that rattled the AI world with a cheap and capable open model, is about to bank one of the largest private raises the sector has seen. The round is being finalised at roughly 100 billion yuan, about $15 billion, led by the battery giant CATL and the internet group Tencent, according to Reuters reporting carried by China Daily and corroborated by Dealroom and Bloomberg.

This is an update to the round we first covered last week. The target has climbed as the deal came together, from 50 billion yuan to 80 billion and now to the full 100 billion, with a reported valuation goal near 2.5 trillion yuan. Accounts differ on whether the money has actually landed. Reuters describes a round still being finalised and expected to close in the coming days, while Bloomberg-based reports treat it as done, so I would call it closing rather than closed.

Capital against the current

The timing is what gives the raise its edge. It comes in the same week that Washington ordered federal civilian agencies to strip DeepSeek's technology from their systems on security grounds. One Chinese champion is being shut out of the US government at the same moment its domestic backers are writing some of the biggest cheques in the industry. It is a neat illustration of how far the two AI economies have drifted apart.

Only one outlet I saw tied the raise directly to the federal ban, and the Chinese state coverage reportedly does not mention it at all, so I would not read the two as cause and effect. What is clear is that DeepSeek is not short of friends at home. The company has kept its open-weights strategy going, from its models to the recent release of the inference engine behind them, and a war chest this size buys a lot of runway for a lab that gives much of its work away. An IPO is reportedly penciled in for 2027.