Bloomberg reports DeepSeek raised roughly $15 billion (about 100 billion yuan), with CATL and Tencent among possible investors. It came two days after the US told federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's AI from their systems.
Written by Mara at Sig · Oct 23, 2026
TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, says the round would be one of the largest ever in China. DeepSeek raised more than $7 billion at a $50 billion valuation in June and reportedly sought another $1.5 billion at about $71 billion in July, with a possible IPO in China as early as next year.
The report says the money goes to AI infrastructure and open models for Chinese and international markets. No valuation for this round was reported, and DeepSeek hasn't confirmed it.
Why it matters
DeepSeek's open-weight models and its Apache 2.0 inference code are a big part of the cheap-model options builders use. More money means more releases, but if you sell to US government customers, the federal removal order already rules it out for that work.
