DeepSeek Nears $12 Billion Funding Round Backed by Tencent and CATL, Bloomberg Reports

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that rattled Silicon Valley in early 2025 with a cut-rate model that matched Western performance, is close to locking down at least 80 billion yuan ($11.93 billion) in its latest funding round, according to Bloomberg News, which cited people familiar with the matter.

That's already well above the 50 billion yuan DeepSeek originally targeted when the round opened in July, according to a report carried by rallies.ai. Bloomberg's sources say term sheets already signed could push the final number toward 100 billion yuan, roughly $14.9 billion.

Tencent Holdings and Contemporary Amperex Technology, the battery maker known as CATL, have committed among the largest amounts in the round, Bloomberg reported. Neither DeepSeek, Tencent, nor CATL has publicly confirmed the numbers. A CATL representative declined to comment on the report, according to Business Times Singapore, and Tencent had no immediate comment.

Every outlet covering this story, including The Star Malaysia, the Business Times Singapore, and Calcalist's Ctech, is working from the same unnamed-source Bloomberg report. That's one claim circulating widely, not independent confirmation from multiple newsrooms.

Why Investors Are Piling In

The demand surge tracks with DeepSeek's September release of its V4.1-Flash model, which Calcalist's Ctech reported was built for faster inference and higher throughput. Business Times Singapore said the model "reset expectations for cost versus performance" against Anthropic and OpenAI.

DeepSeek originally sought a 500 billion yuan valuation, about $74 billion, when the round launched in July, according to rallies.ai. The company has reportedly hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a possible listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, though rallies.ai said the timing, valuation, and final fundraising size remain undecided. Business Times Singapore, citing its own sources, described the goal as a "landmark" IPO in early 2027, without specifying the exchange.

That's a real discrepancy worth flagging: one source says STAR Market domestic listing is still undecided, another frames an early-2027 IPO as closer to locked in. Readers should treat the 2027 timeline as a reported target, not a scheduled event.

The Huawei Angle

DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei Technologies' AI accelerators at a data center under construction in Inner Mongolia, according to Business Times Singapore, which said that could create one of the largest known clusters of Huawei chips anywhere. DeepSeek has also published software built with Huawei to program those chips.

China is building an AI supply chain that doesn't need Nvidia, and DeepSeek is now one of the biggest names doing it. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan put it bluntly in comments cited by Calcalist's Ctech: "If we're not careful, China will be ahead of us. DeepSeek was just a wake-up call."

That's a competitor's CEO with every incentive to sound the alarm, so take the framing for what it is. But the underlying fact, Chinese AI firms racing to build domestic-chip capacity at scale, is not in dispute.

The Number Problem

A tracking summary from mediabias.news, which monitored 21 outlets covering the story as of Tuesday morning, found The Star Malaysia and Emirates24|7 reporting "at least $12 billion," while the Straits Times reported $15 billion and a digest from Sweden's Dagens industri cited a figure of 120 billion yuan, which would be roughly $17.9 billion.

That's a spread of nearly $6 billion across outlets covering the same underlying Bloomberg report. The mediabias.news tracker also noted that none of the rated left-leaning outlets in its sample had covered the story as of its last check, and that centrist and right-rated outlets largely left out DeepSeek's original 50 billion yuan target when reporting the final haul, making the jump look more dramatic than Bloomberg's own sourcing supports.

What's Still Unconfirmed

Founder Liang Wenfeng, a former hedge fund manager, has told investors in at least one meeting this year that he intends to keep releasing open AI models while chasing artificial general intelligence, according to Bloomberg, with monetization a secondary priority. If true, that's an unusual stance for a company about to take in $12 billion-plus and prep an IPO.

None of that is confirmed by DeepSeek directly. The company did not respond to a request for comment during a Chinese public holiday, Business Times Singapore reported. Until DeepSeek, Tencent, or CATL go on record, the exact size of this round and what it means for DeepSeek's IPO timeline remain a Bloomberg-sourced estimate rather than a locked-in fact.