Tencent and Alibaba plan to invest in DeepSeek, a company valued at over $20 billion.

Tencent and Alibaba are considering investing in the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek

Large technology companies in China – Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group – are negotiating to invest money in the startup DeepSeek, which is developing artificial intelligence.

- Company valuation: about $20 billion.
- Owner: Chinese hedge fund High‑Flyer Capital Management.
- DeepSeek seeks additional funding to support the growth and development of its AI models.

What sources say
The publication *The Information* reported that DeepSeek is opening negotiations for external capital with a goal of raising at least $300 million.

Such requests highlight the massive investments required to create and operate advanced AI systems, especially given the increasing complexity of logical reasoning and autonomous bot agents.

Negotiations are ongoing, and both the company’s valuation and the size of the investment may change.

American venture capitalists express concerns about the risks of investing in DeepSeek due to intense competition between Chinese and American AI developers, as well as the contradictory positions of the governments of both countries.

Additional context
At the beginning of the year, *Reuters* reported that DeepSeek had not presented its flagship model to U.S. chip manufacturers. Instead, the company trained one of its latest models on a cutting‑edge Nvidia graphics processor, despite the U.S. government’s export ban on such devices to China.

Thus, Tencent and Alibaba are considering an investment in DeepSeek as a strategic move in the race for leadership in artificial intelligence, while facing geopolitical risks and high capital requirements.