DeepSeek Asked for 50 Billion Yuan and Is Being Offered Twice That. One of the Biggest Cheques Is Reportedly From a Battery Maker

DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan in its second external funding round, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, with Tencent and the battery manufacturer CATL among the largest committed investors. Reuters, citing its own source, reported the same raise. The round opened with a target of roughly 50 billion yuan. Demand has been strong enough that the final figure could reach 100 billion yuan, and the company is expected to close it this month.

On the same day, Bloomberg reported that Moonshot AI has completed its final private round at a $50 billion valuation and filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing in the first quarter of 2027, seeking up to $5 billion.

Neither company has confirmed either report. Both are reported, not announced, and the numbers should be read that way — including the dollar figures, where outlets converting the same 80 billion yuan have published anything from $10.6 billion to $12 billion. The yuan amounts are the reliable part.

The money is not coming from where American AI money comes from

In the United States, frontier labs are capitalised largely by the companies that sell them compute. Microsoft's position in OpenAI, Nvidia's equity arrangements, Amazon's and Google's investments in Anthropic — the money and the hardware move in a closed loop, and the investor's return partly arrives as its own revenue.

DeepSeek's reported cap table does not look like that. Tencent is the familiar name: a platform company with cloud capacity and distribution to gain. CATL is not. It is the world's largest manufacturer of electric-vehicle batteries, and it has no obvious commercial channel for a language model. Its presence among the biggest cheques says less about strategic fit than about where large pools of Chinese industrial cash are now willing to go, and how normal it has become to treat a stake in a national AI champion as a reasonable use of a manufacturer's balance sheet.

That bears directly on what export controls were supposed to accomplish. Restricting chip sales raises the cost of compute. It does not remove the ability to pay. A lab that can raise 100 billion yuan domestically, from investors who need no American approval for anything, has turned a hardware ceiling into a procurement and engineering problem — which is the problem DeepSeek has visibly been working on. On September 30 it published a TileLang backend and five kernel and communication libraries for Huawei's Ascend 950, developed with Huawei.

A listing is a strange destination for a lab that discloses nothing

DeepSeek has never published revenue. Moonshot's figures, as reported, are the most interesting single data point in either story: annual recurring revenue of about $1 billion, up from $300 million in June, with Bloomberg's sources projecting $2 billion by December. If accurate, that is a tripling in four months, and the first quantified claim that a Chinese lab's commercial business is a business rather than a subsidised demonstration.

It is also a claim a prospectus has to stand behind. Both the STAR Market and the Hong Kong exchange require audited accounts, risk disclosure and continuing reporting. Within a year it may be possible to read what a Chinese frontier lab spends on compute, what it charges, and what it loses — figures currently unavailable for any frontier lab anywhere, the American ones included.

The disclosure that makes a listing possible also makes the unresolved problems concrete. The Cyberspace Administration of China has been investigating both companies since September over user data that may have reached Anthropic, according to The Information, after Anthropic alleged on September 10 that the two had relayed their own users' requests to Claude and returned the answers as their own. Neither company has commented publicly. The regulator has set no timetable and has not said whether it will penalise anyone. An open state investigation into how a company handles user data is exactly the sort of item that belongs in a risk section, and exactly the sort that moves a listing date.

What to watch

Whether DeepSeek's round closes at 80 billion yuan or 100, since the gap is the difference between a well-funded lab and one with several years of frontier training paid for in advance. Whether Moonshot's investor meetings start in October as reported. And whether either filing discloses compute spending in enough detail to answer the question the industry has been estimating since January 2025: what a frontier model actually costs to train when the chips are the ones you are permitted to buy.

Sources: Bloomberg — DeepSeek to Raise at Least $12 Billion in Tencent-Backed Funding · Reuters via Investing.com — DeepSeek set to net over $12 billion in new fundraising, source says · Bloomberg — Moonshot Said to Eye Early 2027 IPO After Value Hits $50 Billion · Euronews — Moonshot AI eyes Hong Kong IPO after $50 billion valuation as DeepSeek raises capital · Calcalist — Moonshot AI hits $50 billion valuation as it prepares for Hong Kong IPO · Tech Startups — DeepSeek to raise $12 billion in Tencent- and CATL-backed funding ahead of IPO · The Next Web — China is investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot, The Information reports · deepseek-ai/DeepGEMM-Ascend on GitHub