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October 24, 2026
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has raised $15 billion in one of China’s largest-ever funding rounds, with CATL and Tencent among investors, as it scales infrastructure and open models globally.
The global AI funding race just hit a new high-water mark from an unexpected corner. DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based Chinese AI startup that shook Silicon Valley in early 2025 with its open-weight reasoning model, has raised approximately $15 billion; equivalent to 100 billion yuan; in one of the largest funding rounds in Chinese corporate history.
Potential investors include CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, and Tencent, the conglomerate behind WeChat and one of China’s most powerful technology conglomerates.
The round represents a dramatic acceleration for a startup that raised just over $7 billion in June 2026 at a valuation of $50 billion. That earlier raise already marked a significant moment, and the latest injection more than doubles what was considered one of the year’s most notable AI financings.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who previously co-founded High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund whose data and computing infrastructure helped finance DeepSeek’s early development.
The company gained global attention in January 2025 when it released its R1 reasoning model as a free, open-weight system; a move that rattled US markets, raised serious questions about the assumed cost of frontier AI development, and triggered a fresh wave of debate about China’s capability to compete at the top of the AI stack.
The new capital is earmarked for AI infrastructure expansion and the continued development of open models for both domestic and international markets. The launch of DeepSeek V4 Pro coincides with the funding announcement, signalling that the company intends to match its financial firepower with product momentum.
DeepSeek’s rise has unfolded alongside a broader surge in Chinese AI investment. In May 2026, Moonshot AI, the developer of Kimi, secured $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation. Kimi’s parent company subsequently unveiled Kimi K3 at the World AI Conference in July, described as the world’s largest open AI model by parameter count.
The $15 billion raise cements DeepSeek’s position not merely as a Chinese competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic, but as a globally significant AI infrastructure company with the capital base to sustain a long race.
For the US, which has been tightening chip export controls and coordinating allied restrictions on Chinese AI hardware access through initiatives like Pax Silica, the scale of DeepSeek’s latest raise is a stark reminder that capital constraints alone will not determine who builds the next generation of AI.
