Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan in a new funding round backed by Tencent Holdings and battery maker CATL.

Strong investor demand for the round pushed commitments past the initial 50-billion-yuan target, with signed term sheets indicating the final total could reach 100 billion yuan ahead of a planned public listing in early 2027.

Proceeds will fund computing infrastructure and model training. The company had initially sought an equity valuation of roughly 500 billion yuan during negotiations.

Investor interest accelerated after DeepSeek introduced its V4 Flash large language model, which cut operating expenses relative to proprietary models from US developers OpenAI and Anthropic. Tencent, which previously contributed 10 billion yuan in an earlier funding round, joined Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. In providing the largest commitments for the current transaction.

Founder Liang Wenfeng told investors during 2026 meetings that the company intends to develop open-source systems and pursue artificial general intelligence without prioritising immediate product monetisation. The lab traces its roots to Liang’s quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which provided the original seed capital before outside institutions entered.

DeepSeek is allocating a substantial share of the fresh capital to build an artificial intelligence computing facility in Inner Mongolia. The site will house at least 160,000 high-end accelerators supplied by Huawei Technologies, establishing one of the largest single clusters of domestic Chinese silicon.

To support that infrastructure, DeepSeek released joint software tools developed with Huawei to optimise workload programming on non-Nvidia processors. The project reduces reliance on imported hardware while addressing bandwidth and efficiency constraints across large server arrays.

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