Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has opened talks with prospective investors for a new funding round that would value the company at $71 billion before the deal closes, according to the Financial Times. The talks began this week, barely a month after DeepSeek closed its first-ever external funding round.
From $50 billion to $71 billion
That earlier round, which closed in early June, raised more than $7 billion from investors including Tencent Holdings and battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), pushing DeepSeek’s valuation above $50 billion. A fresh round at a $71 billion pre-money valuation would mark a roughly 40% jump in just a few weeks — an unusually fast pace even by the standards of the current AI funding boom.
No details have emerged yet about which investors might join the new round or when it could close, and the talks could still fall through.
Why DeepSeek needs more cash
According to the FT, the additional capital is meant to cover rising computing costs. DeepSeek is reportedly planning to build out its own data center capacity and buy more AI chips as it expands beyond chatbots into AI agents, a shift that demands significantly more compute than running a single model.
DeepSeek rattled the AI industry in early 2025 by showing it could train competitive models with comparatively modest computing resources, a reputation that has helped Chinese AI labs keep pace with better-funded US rivals despite Washington’s export controls on advanced chips. The new fundraising talks suggest that even DeepSeek now needs much larger sums of capital to keep up with the compute-heavy strategies of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.