DeepSeek is finishing a funding round that has generated about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion) from existing and new investors, Reuters reported on October 22nd, 2026, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Reuters said Bloomberg News first reported the roughly $15 billion figure the same day.

Quartz's account of the Bloomberg report said Bloomberg described the raise as one of the largest financing rounds in China's history. The company has also hired CITIC Securities to advise on a possible Shanghai listing.

What happened

Bloomberg reported that the Hangzhou-based company lifted its fundraising goal at least twice, moving from an initial 50 billion yuan to 80 billion yuan before settling on about 100 billion yuan, according to Quartz and Investing.com. Reuters framed the same sequence as DeepSeek doubling its original 50 billion yuan target.

Reuters reported that the round values DeepSeek at 500 billion yuan before new capital is injected. The South China Morning Post put that pre-money figure at about $74 billion when it reported on the round in late August 2026, and the Wall Street Journal reported a valuation of roughly $74 billion going into the final close, according to Quartz.

Who is in it

Battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and WeChat operator Tencent Holdings were among the biggest investors in the round, according to both Bloomberg and Reuters on October 22nd, 2026. Reuters reported that Midea, Meituan, Geely and GigaDevice became new DeepSeek investors this time around.

Reuters also named Boyu Capital, CPE and Legend Capital as investors, alongside existing shareholder IDG Capital, and said one source put the total number of investors at more than 15. CNBC reported on October 6th, 2026 that state-backed funds and corporate investors were jostling for stakes while individual investors were being restricted, and that CATL, Geely Auto, Monolith Management and Loyal Valley Capital had committed capital at that point.

What the record shows

DeepSeek's reputation was built on spending very little. The Register reported in September 2025 that the V3 model required about 2.79 million H800 GPU hours at an estimated cost of $5.58 million, and a commentary indexed by PubMed Central put V3's pre-training cost at $5.576 million.

The company's first external funding round raised $7.4 billion at a valuation above $50 billion, with founder Liang Wenfeng investing about $3 billion of his own money alongside Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase and a state-backed AI fund, according to a Seeking Alpha summary of Wall Street Journal reporting in July 2026. The Wall Street Journal described the current round as DeepSeek's second private financing.

Scale is still relative. Investing.com, citing Bloomberg, reported that even after this round DeepSeek has considerably less financial firepower than U.S. rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, which have each raised more than $100 billion. Because DeepSeek is private and no IPO filing has been made public, there is no insider filing record on our side to set against any of this.

What to watch

The Wall Street Journal reported that DeepSeek is working on an accelerated IPO timeline aiming for a Shanghai listing and has hired Citic Securities to advise on it, according to Quartz. Reuters reported in September 2026 that the company had hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, per Reuters' October 22nd, 2026 account. The Journal reported that if the plan works out, DeepSeek might reach the stock market before both OpenAI and Chinese rival Moonshot AI.

Nothing here is settled. No IPO filing has been made public and no listing date has been set. Reuters reported that the round is set to complete in the coming days but that the financial details and the investor lineup are not ironclad and could still change, and that DeepSeek, CATL and Tencent had not commented as of October 22nd, 2026.

Reporting on this round came from Reuters (via WKZO and The Star), Bloomberg News as relayed by Quartz and Investing.com via Yahoo Finance, the Wall Street Journal as summarized by Quartz and Seeking Alpha, CNBC, the South China Morning Post, The Register and the Reuters newsfeed on TradingView, dated October 22nd, 2026 unless otherwise noted.

Informational only, not investment advice.