727 FinancePANews, October 30 news: According to The Information, details of DeepSeek's second round of financing have surfaced. This round reached 105.5 billion yuan (approximately 15.8 billion USD), attracting nearly 30 investors, corresponding to a company valuation of approximately 615.5 billion yuan. Tencent Holdings and CATL remain the two major contributors: Tencent invested 10 billion yuan in both rounds; CATL and its chairman Zeng Yuqun invested 5 billion yuan and 10 billion yuan in the two rounds, respectively. Industrial capital including ChangXin Memory Technologies, SMIC, vivo, Meituan, Geely Automobile, Midea Group, Luxshare Precision, Trip.com, and Xiaohongshu also participated, with some individual contributions ranging from 1 billion to 3 billion yuan.
The participation of state-owned capital has increased significantly. China's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund invested another 1 billion yuan in this round, the same as in the first round. Institutions such as China Mobile, China Telecom, CICC, CITIC Securities, and China Life Insurance also participated in the investment, with individual contributions ranging from 2 billion to 8 billion yuan. People familiar with the matter said that continued increases in the prices of Nvidia's high-end chips and concerns about a bubble in the AI industry are the reasons DeepSeek doubled the size of its fundraising midway.
Previously, on October 22, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek had completed approximately 100 billion yuan in financing, led by CATL and Tencent.