DeepSeek in talks for $45b funding round

China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund is in talks to lead DeepSeek’s first external funding round at about a US$45 billion valuation.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup founded in 2023 by High-Flyer co-founder Liang Wenfeng.

Bloomberg previously reported that Tencent and Alibaba were also discussing an investment at a targeted US$40 billion valuation.

The round terms and participants are not final.

The fundraising comes as DeepSeek expands into agentic AI and seeks more computing power from data center operators.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

DeepSeek is not raising money because it needs cash soon. The company has had backing from High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund it came from 1.
The aim is to set a market value so staff can gauge their stock options and to curb exits as richer rivals recruit hard 1.
DeepSeek plans to sell no more than 3% of its equity to limit dilution. Founder Liang Wenfeng also holds almost all voting rights 1, 2.
The company was also described as seeking at least US$300 million at a valuation of at least US$10 billion 3, 1.

DeepSeek says V4-Pro trails top proprietary AI models by about 3 to 6 months. It still offers a 1-million-token context window with performance near the frontier 4, 5.
Its listed application programming interface (API) price is far below GPT-5.5. Output costs $3.48 per 1 million tokens versus $30 for GPT-5.5, or about 9x less 6, 5.
In one pricing example, a task priced at $35 with GPT-5.5 would cost $5.22 with DeepSeek V4 6.
That mix of strong capability, low cost, and open weights under an MIT license, a permissive software license that allows broad reuse and modification, could squeeze proprietary AI firms by cutting deployment costs and letting customers host or change the model themselves 6, 4.