DeepSeek raises ~$15B, double its target, days after US restrictions

TechCrunch reported that DeepSeek closed a funding round of 100 billion yuan (about $15B). The round reached twice its original target, with backing from battery giant CATL, Tencent, Meituan and automaker Geely. It is DeepSeek's first large outside raise and puts it in the same capital league as the best-funded Western challengers.

The investor mix is telling. These are Chinese industrial and platform giants, not foreign VCs, signaling domestic strategic alignment around a national AI champion. CATL and Geely point to AI deployment in manufacturing and vehicles; Tencent and Meituan to consumer platforms. The money funds compute — and, given export controls, likely more Huawei Ascend capacity alongside NVIDIA hardware. DeepSeek's newly open-sourced DeepInfer inference stack supports both.

The timing amplifies the signal. The round came days after US federal restrictions on DeepSeek. It was followed by state-media-reported approval for global deployment and an aggressive price cut on agent search APIs. OpenAI's ~$30B raise the same week shows both sides of the US-China AI race are capitalizing at unprecedented scale.

Caveats: valuation terms were not disclosed, and the funding does not solve chip access. Community estimates of up to 90% gross margins from DeepInfer are unverified. Watch how DeepSeek deploys the capital — whether on a V5-class training run or on international expansion now that it has regulatory clearance.