China’s leading chip investment fund is in talks to lead a fundraising round for DeepSeek at a valuation of around $45 billion, the report said. Financial Timesciting sources close to the conversations.
The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund wants to lead the round, but the details of the operation and the list of investors have not yet been finalized, according to the newspaper. The state-owned vehicle, known as Big Fund, is one of the backers of some of the biggest Chinese names in semiconductors, such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC).
The fund’s possible entry reinforces the weight that Beijing is giving to the first round of financing for the country’s most talked-about AI startup. The Big Fund is a key player in China’s strategy to reduce dependence on US technologies, such as Nvidia’s AI accelerators. At the launch of its latest model, the V4, DeepSeek made a point of highlighting its compatibility with AI chips from local champion Huawei.
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The company is in fundraising talks with some of the largest technology groups in China. Tencent and Alibaba are also negotiating to participate in DeepSeek’s first round of external financing, which targets a valuation of around US$40 billion, as Bloomberg News had already anticipated.
DeepSeek is controlled by hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management. The manager’s co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, created the startup in 2023. In January 2025, it launched an AI model considered a game changer, which shook the market by delivering performance comparable to that of US rivals, despite China’s restrictions on international talent and cutting-edge semiconductors.
In the wake of the rise of OpenClaw, DeepSeek is advancing in “agentic AI”, an area that brings together systems capable of executing tasks autonomously, without human intervention, and which has become one of the sector’s biggest bets.
By March, the startup had already published more than a dozen vacancies for positions related to AI agents. Like most companies in the sector, it seeks capital and partnerships to access high-cost computing infrastructure, relying on giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, which operate large data centers, to support expansion into new fronts.
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