DeepSeek is close to locking in a financing round of at least 800 billion yuan, with a maximum amount approaching 1 trillion yuan, according to Bloomberg-confirmed reporting1. Tencent is backing the round, which would rank among the largest private raises any AI company has completed globally2. CNBC's sources say DeepSeek is weighing doubling the round to as much as $15 billion.
The raise lands amid a widening gap between how primary and secondary markets are pricing China's large-model companies. On October 8, MiniMax Group Inc closed down more than 13% on the Hong Kong exchange, and Zhipu AI fell over 7%, pushing the Hang Seng Tech Index to 4,073 points, its lowest level since September 2024.
While public-market valuations contracted, private-round prices kept climbing. In the same week Bloomberg confirmed DeepSeek's round, Moonshot AI completed its last private placement before an IPO at a valuation of 500 billion US dollars. 36Kr characterized the split as a full replacement of the decision-makers who set valuations across the two markets.
The 36Kr headline frames MiniMax Group Inc's valuation as having "plunged 80%" from its prior level. ANALYSIS That figure, set against DeepSeek's multi-billion-dollar primary raise, illustrates the degree to which public and private pricing have decoupled for Chinese AI companies.
DeepSeek's round is one of several large China-AI transactions tracked during the week of October 3–10. Manus raised more than $500 million in its first round since splitting from Meta, reopening its Beijing office and hiring heavily around personal AI assistants. Keling reportedly selected banks for an IPO targeting more than $1 billion.
OpenAI's own revenue trajectory provides a Western-market counterpoint: the company recently disclosed a current run rate roughly $20 billion below the $70 billion figure that had circulated among investors[2]. ANALYSIS The simultaneous compression of frontier-lab revenue forecasts in the West and record private raises in China underscores how differently investors in each market are currently pricing the sector's near-term economics.