DeepSeek is in talks to raise about 50 billion yuan in its first external funding round. That is roughly 7.5 billion dollars. The round would value the Chinese AI startup at about 500 billion yuan.

Reports say Tencent and Alibaba are considering taking part. The talks were reported this week.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has made a big strategic bet. He wants the company to train future models on domestic Chinese chips instead of Nvidia hardware.

Huawei is expected to begin supplying training chips to DeepSeek in the fourth quarter of 2026. Shipments would continue into early 2027, according to The Information.

DeepSeek has already adapted its V4 preview model for Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips. It also released open-source tools to help developers work with Ascend hardware.

Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips at a data centre in Inner Mongolia. The chips are meant to run finished models for users at large scale.