Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek is in talks to raise approximately $1.5 billion in new funding at a valuation of roughly $71 billion, and has begun preparations for an initial public offering that could come as soon as 2027, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.
The discussions come just weeks after DeepSeek closed its first-ever outside funding round, a deal that raised roughly $7 billion at a post-money valuation of about $52 billion, with backers including Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase, IDG Capital and China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. The new round would represent a valuation increase of roughly 37% in under six weeks. DeepSeek declined to comment on the funding discussions, Bloomberg reported.The Hangzhou-based company is working with accounting and banking advisers to finalize its financial statements by the end of December, a required step before filing for an IPO, according to the report. A filing could come as early as late 2026, with a market debut targeted for 2027, an unusually rapid timeline for a company that only began accepting outside capital in April at a $10 billion valuation. The listing venue has not been finalized, though a mainland China A-share listing or a Hong Kong Stock Exchange debut are both seen as likely options, according to people familiar with the discussions.DeepSeek, founded in 2023, first drew global attention in early 2025 after releasing its V3 and R1 models, which matched or approached the performance of leading Western AI systems at a fraction of the reported development cost, unsettling assumptions about the scale of investment required to compete at the frontier of AI development. The company has continued to gain enterprise traction since; DeepSeek accounted for roughly 22.6% of token volume processed through Vercel’s AI Gateway in June, trailing only Google and Anthropic, according to Vercel’s own reporting.The fresh capital is intended primarily to fund infrastructure rather than model research alone. DeepSeek has posted recruitment listings for an internal data center team and said it plans to build gigawatt-scale computing facilities, managed in-house from planning through operations. The company is separately developing its own AI inference chips to reduce dependence on external suppliers, Reuters reported July 7, holding early discussions with chip design firms, wafer foundries and memory companies as it works to reduce reliance on Nvidia and Huawei hardware. DeepSeek’s cloud service currently runs in part on Huawei’s Ascend chips.Founder Liang Wenfeng’s stake, still roughly 78% following the first funding round, has pushed his personal net worth to an estimated $36 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the wealthiest AI company founder globally, ahead of his counterparts at OpenAI and Anthropic. Liang personally contributed $3 billion to the company’s first outside funding round.DeepSeek’s fundraising push comes as global AI companies pursue public listings on a similar timeline. OpenAI and Anthropic both confidentially filed for IPOs in June, reportedly targeting valuations as high as $1 trillion, while SpaceX, which owns xAI, completed what was described as the largest IPO in stock market history the same month. Management has told DeepSeek investors the company intends to prioritize AI research over near-term commercialization, according to Bloomberg’s reporting.
