DeepSeek nears $45 billion valuation as China’s ‘Big Fund’ leads investment talks, FT reports
The state-backed fund could become DeepSeek’s lead backer after the startup’s flagship V4 model drove rapid investor interest.
- China's state-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund is in talks to lead a fundraising round for DeepSeek, valuing the AI startup at about $45 billion.
- The startup's valuation surged from $10 billion to $45 billion in three weeks; founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek had previously relied entirely on internal financing from High-Flyer Capital Management.
- Following the April 24 launch of DeepSeek V4, the model achieved full-stack adaptation on Huawei's Ascend 950PR chip platform, delivering up to 2.87 times the performance of Nvidia's China-specific H20 processor.
- China's largest internet groups—Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance, and Tencent Holdings—have collectively ordered hundreds of thousands of Ascend 950 processors following the V4 release, as domestic firms race to support the model.
- Known as the 'Big Fund,' the investment vehicle acts as the central tool Beijing uses to finance semiconductor self-sufficiency, treating frontier-AI labs as strategic assets rather than normal venture investments.
18 Articles
18 Articles
Times of India
The Economic TimesDeepSeek nears $45 billion valuation as China's 'big fund' leads investment talks, FT reports
China's biggest state-backed semiconductor investment vehicle, China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, is in talks to lead the financing of DeepSeek's first fundraising that could value the frontier AI lab at about $45 billion.
China's Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, usually called ‘Big Fund', is seeking to lead investment in DeepSeek. Other investors that are still in negotiations to acquire a stake in the company include the Chinese technology giant Tencent, although the final list has not yet been defined, refers to ‘Financial Times'. DeepSeek gained prominence in January 2025 after the launch of R1, a powerful open source language model, which, accordi…
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