Artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) in a new funding round, as investors continue to commit large amounts of capital to leading AI companies.
The reported funding, with major companies including Tencent Holdings and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL) among the investors, would significantly exceed DeepSeek’s initial target of about 50 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg.
The development comes amid rapidly rising valuations across the AI industry, with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies attracting increasingly large amounts of private capital.
Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek’s latest funding round could approach 100 billion yuan (or about $15 billion) based on signed term sheets, although the final amount could still change as negotiations continue.
The company is also preparing for a potential initial public offering and plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei AI accelerators at a data centre under construction in Inner Mongolia.
DeepSeek’s reported fundraising comes as OpenAI seeks to raise even larger amounts of capital as it expands its AI infrastructure and operations.
If completed at the reported terms, the potential funding round would represent a substantial increase from OpenAI’s latest completed $852 billion valuation and further highlight the scale of capital being directed toward frontier AI companies.
The surge in valuations among leading AI companies extends beyond OpenAI, with Anthropic also seeing a sharp increase in its valuation expectations.
Anthropic reported nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and a $42 billion net loss, while outlining plans for $518 billion in future cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations, according to its IPO prospectus.
The rapid increase in the company’s potential valuation reflects growing investor expectations surrounding AI, despite the enormous infrastructure costs required to operate and develop frontier models.
