DeepSeek said to eye major funding round led by Tencent and Alibaba at $20B+ valuation

Tencent Global and Alibaba Group are reportedly in talks to lead a large fundraising for China's AI startup DeepSeek, valuing the company at more than $20 billion. The proposed capital would be used to speed up development of DeepSeek's open-source large language models and expand its autonomous-agent infrastructure. The discussions underscore a push by China's tech heavyweights to strengthen their position across the global AI hardware–software stack, coming after DeepSeek's recent V4 model launch that shook up compute-efficiency benchmarks. Source: The Information