DeepSeek Raising About $15 Billion in Funding Round With Tencent and CATL Among Largest Investors, Reports Say

DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest funding round, with Tencent and battery maker CATL among the largest investors, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 21, citing people familiar with the matter. The round grew as it went: the target was raised at least twice, from an initial 50 billion yuan to 80 billion yuan before reaching the final amount, per the Bloomberg report. Reuters and China Daily described the round as still being finalized and expected to close in the coming days, with terms that could still change. DeepSeek has not officially confirmed the raise, and no valuation has been disclosed by the company.

The Hangzhou-based company has been reported to be preparing for a potential listing, and The Information reported in September that its annualized revenue run rate had reached $1 billion, more than double the level a few months earlier. For Tencent and CATL, the stakes add exposure to one of China's most prominent AI model developers.

Separately from the funding, DeepSeek has been building software support for Huawei's Ascend AI chips. Around Sept. 30 it released Ascend support for TileLang, DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, FlashMLA and DeepSelect, according to a SemiAnalysis report on the two companies' collaboration. SemiAnalysis cautioned that only TileLang was usable at the time of writing, because other components depend on a Huawei CANN software release that had not yet shipped. The funding reports do not mention Huawei, so the two developments should be read as parallel rather than connected.

The items to watch are a formal confirmation of the round and its terms, any disclosed valuation, and whether DeepSeek's next models train or serve at scale on domestic Ascend hardware, which would matter for both Chinese AI capex and demand for U.S. accelerators in China.