DeepSeek seeks $71B valuation round weeks after $7B close. Capital for data centers and custom chips to sustain 11x cheaper pricing than GPT-5.5.
DeepSeek is in early talks for a new funding round at a $71 billion pre-money valuation, weeks after closing its first $7 billion round in late May. The capital targets building its own data centers and AI chips to sustain aggressive pricing on its V4 models.
Key facts
- DeepSeek raising at $71B pre-money valuation.
- First round closed in late May at $7B.
- V4-Pro priced 11x cheaper than GPT-5.5 input.
- Founder Liang Wenfeng contributed $3B personally.
- Ramp data shows DeepSeek fastest-growing US vendor.
DeepSeek closed its first round at roughly $7 billion, valuing the company at $52 billion, the Financial Times reports. Now the Hangzhou-based startup is in early talks with new investors for a round at a pre-money valuation of about $71 billion. The money would go toward building its own data centers and buying AI chips. At the same time, DeepSeek is developing its own inference chip to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei. Founder Liang Wenfeng put in about $3 billion himself, making him the largest backer. Other investors include CATL, Tencent, JD.com, NetEase, and China's state-backed AI fund.
The need for capital is tied directly to DeepSeek's aggressive expansion. The company recently released V4-Pro and V4-Flash, the largest open-weights models with up to 1.6 trillion parameters. The rock-bottom V4-Pro prices have been made permanent and come in at roughly eleven times cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input.
The strategy is working. According to US financial services firm Ramp, which tracks real spending across more than 50,000 companies, DeepSeek was among the fastest-growing software vendors among US businesses in June. Ramp did flag security risks, though, since companies are sending data directly through DeepSeek's platform.
Meanwhile, the performance gap with Western leaders has widened. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Mythos have reached a new tier that DeepSeek can't match yet. Still, the gap in performance is far smaller than the gap in price.
Competition inside China is heating up fast. Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2, an open-source model that trails Anthropic's Opus models by only a few percentage points on hours-long coding tasks and is gaining traction with enterprises. MiniMax is reportedly working on a 2.7 trillion-parameter model that could ship as early as Q3. And Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, is looking for fresh capital at a valuation of up to $30 billion. The race among Chinese AI labs has never been this intense.
Key Takeaways
- DeepSeek seeks $71B valuation round weeks after $7B close.
- Capital for data centers and custom chips to sustain 11x cheaper pricing than GPT-5.5.
What to watch
Watch for the close of DeepSeek's new round and whether the $71B valuation holds. Also track MiniMax's 2.7T-parameter model expected in Q3, which could intensify the Chinese AI pricing war further.
Source: the-decoder.com
Originally published on gentic.news
Top comments (0)