DeepSeek Raises Nearly $12B Ahead of 2027 IPO

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, is closing a new funding round worth almost $12 billion. The total could grow to $15 billion. DeepSeek originally asked for just $7.5 billion. The round values the company at roughly $75 billion. CATL, the Chinese battery maker, and Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, are putting in the largest shares. DeepSeek is preparing for an IPO in early 2027. The company already trains its models on a data center with more than 160,000 Huawei AI chips.

Chinese models like DeepSeek's often score well on benchmarks. But a benchmark score says little about real-world performance. One key test is coding, where models work through coding agents. Coding agents are AI programs that write and run code on their own. Until now, Chinese models have lagged behind Opus and Fable here. Opus and Fable are Anthropic models used inside Claude Code, the terminal-based AI coding tool. This new funding round suggests investors are betting on something else. They seem to trust DeepSeek's scale, its own chip supply, and its IPO plans more than any jump in model quality.