DeepSeek Valuation Approaches $45 Billion, Chinese 'Big Fund' Seeks to Lead Investment

China's largest national-level semiconductor investment fund, the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the "Big Fund"), is seeking to lead the first round of external financing for DeepSeek, according to insiders, which values the company at approximately $45 billion.

Tech giants such as Tencent are also in talks to participate in the investment, but the final investors are yet to be determined. Notably, DeepSeek founder and Hangzhou-based billionaire, Liang Wenfeng, may also personally participate in this round of financing. According to company documents, Liang Wenfeng controls approximately 89.5% of DeepSeek's shares through personal holdings and associated entities.

DeepSeek gained fame in January 2025 with its open-source large-scale model R1, claiming to have trained it at a computational cost significantly lower than that of American competitors like OpenAI, which rocked Silicon Valley. The valuation has skyrocketed from $20 billion to $45 billion within weeks since the start of the financing talks, reflecting investors' high recognition of its technological potential—although DeepSeek has not prioritized commercialization.

The Big Fund's involvement holds strategic implications. The fund has previously focused on supporting core semiconductor enterprises like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC). If it officially invests in DeepSeek, it will further solidify China's strategic layout for building an independent AI ecosystem with "domestic models + domestic software + domestic chips." DeepSeek's latest V4 model has been optimized for inferencing on Huawei's Ascend 950PR chips, with Huawei's AI chip sales seeing a significant increase this year, surpassing NVIDIA in the Chinese market.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has expressed concern, stating that "DeepSeek running ahead on Huawei's chips would be an extremely bad outcome for the U.S.," and warned that this could lead to a gradual shift of global AI models towards non-American hardware ecosystems.

Liang Wenfeng's initial intention for initiating the financing was to price employee equity incentives and prevent core researchers from being poached by competitors with high salaries. With the significant increase in valuation, it is expected that he may take this opportunity to expand the financing scale to reserve more funds for future computational power investments.

No comments have been made by DeepSeek, the Big Fund, or Tencent on this matter.