The company is expected to complete the round in the next couple of weeks.

Chinese AI leader DeepSeek is close to finalising a $7.4bn funding round led by Tencent and Contemporary Amperex (CATL), with participation from the $8bn state-backed National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, multiple publications have reported.

The round is expected to value the GenAI darling between $52bn and $59bn, sources added, placing it leagues ahead of rival Moonshot, which raised $2bn last month at a valuation of $20bn.

External participants are expected to invest around $4.4bn, with Tencent pitching in $1.5bn and battery giant CATL around $735m, while company founder Liang Wenfeng has personally invested around $2.94bn, reports suggested.

Alibaba was also reported to be taking part in this round, while Tencent was reported to have proposed taking a 20pc stake in the company, which is expected to complete the round in the next couple of weeks.

DeepSeek’s latest funding round comes as AI contemporaries across the world are raising capital to compete in the fast-advancing race for enterprise adoption.

Claude parent Anthropic announced that it filed to go public earlier this week, with reports estimating the company’s valuation could soar above $1trn. The AI leader raised $65bn at a $965bn valuation in its last private round.

OpenAI, recently valued at $852bn, is also planning to go public. CNBC reported that the company was preparing to confidentially file for an IPO late last month.

DeepSeek’s popularity surged last year after the company launched its model R1, whose cost effectiveness and performance sent Silicon Valley leaders into uproar, igniting accusations of theft. R1 was trained using lower-capacity Nvidia chips.

The company took more than a year after R1 to release its long-awaited V4 large language model, which, it claimed at the time, “redefine[d] the state-of-the-art for open models”. V4 was hyped to be the company’s most important launch since R1, and V3 in late 2024.

Other AI rivals in China made a flurry of launches ahead of V4 to avoid competition, including Alibaba with Qwen3.5; ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0; Zhipu’s GLM-5, trained entirely using Chinese chips; MiniMax, which released M2.5; and the Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI, which came out with Kimi K2.5.

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