The rumors are starting.
DeepSeek wants another $1.5 billion.
That’s a lot of zeros for a company that barely has birthday cake left on its table from being founded in 2023. Bloomberg says the tech firm is talking about raising the cash at a $71 billion valuation.
Consider the timing.
They just pulled off a massive $7 billion raise a month ago. Back then they were sitting at $50 billion. Now they want $20 billion more value overnight. Greedy? Maybe. Confident? Definitely.
An IPO might happen.
Maybe late this year.
More likely 2027.
People are talking about going public because they made waves earlier. Big ones. Their models proved you didn’t need billions in Nvidia GPUs to build something sharp. Efficient. Cheap. The US tech giants hated it. Everyone else loved it.
The proof is in the usage data.
Vercel’s gateways saw DeepSnakes handle nearly 23% of all tokens. Think about that scale. Anthropic sat at the top with 32%, sure, but DeepSeek is the only non-American model in that top tier.
It’s working on Huawei chips.
The US export controls were supposed to kill them. They didn’t. They adapted. Investors like Tencent and the Beijing National AI Fund noticed. Money flows to competence. Or maybe just to nationalism. Who knows?
Why wait for 2027 when the momentum is right now?
DeepSeek didn’t reply when asked about it.
Silence. Typical. But the market doesn’t care about silence. It cares about the next run of capital.
We’ll see if they can defend that $71 billion tag. Or if the hype evaporates.
The chips are on the table.
