The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, widely known as the Big Fund, is seeking to lead the Series A financing for DeepSeek, the Financial Times reported on May 6, citing four people with knowledge of the discussions. The specific investment amount and the identities of any co-participants in the round have not been finalised.

If completed, the deal would mark the first time DeepSeek has taken on external capital, ending an unusual funding model that has seen the company operate entirely from the balance sheet of High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund from which it was spun out in July 2023.

DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng, who co-founded High-Flyer and serves as CEO of both entities. The lab came to global attention in January 2025 with the release of DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model that matched the performance of OpenAI’s leading systems at a fraction of the reported cost.

The company claimed it trained its V3 model for $6 million, compared with an estimated $100 million for OpenAI’s GPT-4, and using roughly one-tenth the computing power consumed by Meta’s comparable Llama 3.1. The release triggered a sharp sell-off in Nvidia’s stock, with the chipmaker losing $600 billion in market value, the largest single-company decline in US stock market history.

The Big Fund’s involvement signals that Beijing views DeepSeek as a strategic national asset rather than simply a commercial venture. The fund was established to advance China’s semiconductor industry and has backed major chip players including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. Leading a round for a frontier AI lab represents a notable broadening of its mandate.

A $45 billion valuation would place DeepSeek among the most valuable AI companies in the world, on a par with several of the better-capitalised US AI startups, despite having taken no venture funding and generating no disclosed revenue.

Until now, freedom from external investors has been central to DeepSeek’s operating philosophy. With High-Flyer as its sole backer, the lab has been able to pursue long-term research without commercial pressure or short-term performance targets, a structure Liang has credited with enabling the architectural innovations behind its low-cost training approach.

State backing would preserve some of that insulation from conventional market pressures, but it would also embed DeepSeek more firmly within China’s broader technology policy apparatus at a moment when the US-China AI competition is intensifying.

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