DeepSeek nears a $12-15B round at about $75B valuation, led by Tencent and CATL

The reported round of roughly $12-15B would make DeepSeek one of the most valuable AI labs in China.

The Ascend-optimized libraries are designed to help developers move workloads from NVIDIA's CUDA to Huawei's Ascend chips.

The round reflects Chinese capital consolidating behind domestic AI champions and hardware.

TechRadar questions whether programmers will actually make the switch from CUDA.