DeepSeek's reported China funding round

DeepSeek has reportedly closed a roughly $15 billion funding round, one of China's largest-ever, at a $74 billion pre-money valuation, with CATL, Tencent, and Geely among the key investors. The round originally targeted ¥50 billion but was doubled to ¥100 billion following strong investor demand. Most proceeds are expected to fund compute infrastructure. DeepSeek has not officially confirmed the raise. The company is also reportedly considering a listing on the Shanghai stock exchange. Separately, DeepSeek is reportedly working closely with Huawei to shape future Chinese AI chip design with the goal of reducing reliance on Nvidia, and has unveiled DeepInfer, an open-source inference framework aimed at lowering compute costs and energy use.