Key facts

• DeepSeek has restarted its second funding round, seeking close to $8bn at a valuation of about 500 billion yuan ($74bn).
• The Chinese AI lab invested 140.8 million yuan ($20.8m) in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai listing, buying 2.31% of the strategic placement with a 36-month lock-up.
• DeepSeek and Unitree will jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots, pairing DeepSeek's models with Unitree's motion control and embodied intelligence.
• DeepSeek has warned customers of significant price rises and plans to spend part of the new funding on building its own data centres, including a large facility in Inner Mongolia.
• Unitree priced its IPO on Thursday, raising about 6.1 billion yuan ($904m) at a valuation near $9bn, making it the first humanoid-robot maker to list on the mainland.

DeepSeek spent early 2025 proving that a good AI model did not have to cost a fortune. This week it has been busy proving it can spend one. In a handful of days, the Chinese lab reopened a multi-billion-dollar fundraising. It took a stake in the country’s best-known robot maker. And it told customers it would charge them more.

DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a quantitative finance executive who also helped run the hedge fund High-Flyer. The lab quickly became known for its open-source models and unconventional training methods. Its DeepSeek-V2 and DeepSeek-V3 models attracted global attention for matching the performance of costlier rivals at a fraction of the training bill. In January 2025, the release of DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning-focused model, sent shockwaves through global markets and triggered a sell-off in US tech stocks. The company became a symbol of Chinese AI’s ability to innovate under export-control pressure.

The moves this week mark a strategic pivot for a company that built its reputation on efficiency. DeepSeek’s earlier models showed that high-performance AI could be trained and run at a fraction of the cost of Western rivals. But the company’s latest actions suggest it no longer plans to compete on price alone. Instead, it is investing heavily in physical infrastructure, robotics, and the expensive compute needed for the next stage of artificial intelligence.

An $8bn round, reopened

DeepSeek has restarted its second funding round, seeking close to $8bn, according to a report. The raise values the Hangzhou startup at about 500 billion yuan, or $74bn. Monolith Management, an early backer of the Chinese AI champion Moonshot, is in talks to join the round.

The round is a restart, not a fresh start. DeepSeek paused the process last month after leaked remarks from founder Liang Wenfeng to investors caused friction. The valuation has climbed since its first external round earlier this summer. That round closed near 350 billion yuan and roughly doubled Liang’s net worth to about $36bn.

The company wants to raise about as much again. Discussions are ongoing, the report cautioned, and the size, timing, and investor list can still change. The fact that such a large round is being considered at all shows how far DeepSeek has come from its roots as a research-focused lab.

From efficiency to infrastructure

What the money is for marks the real shift. DeepSeek plans to spend part of it building its own data centres, led by a large facility in Inner Mongolia. The lab that made its name on efficiency now needs its own compute. On the same day the round resurfaced, it also warned users of a significant price rise. DeepSeek is quietly rewriting its own cheap-AI story.

This reversal is significant. For much of 2024 and early 2025, DeepSeek's models were seen as proof that cutting-edge AI could be developed without massive capital spending. The company’s training techniques, including Mixture-of-Experts architectures and efficient use of GPU clusters, were widely studied. Now DeepSeek is signalling that scale matters, and that owning data centres is necessary to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and China’s other AI leaders.

The choice of Inner Mongolia is also practical. The region has relatively low land costs and access to renewable energy, which is essential for power-hungry data centres. It also sits closer to China’s northern grid, which has become a hub for AI infrastructure investments. The move aligns with a broader Chinese push to build sovereign AI capacity, especially as US export controls limit access to advanced chips.

A robot bet in the same week

The second move points somewhere new. DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan, about $20.8m, in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai listing, according to a stock-exchange filing. The stake buys 2.31% of the offering’s strategic placement, with a 36-month lock-up. It reads as a commitment, not a trade.

Alongside it sits a pact to jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots. The two Hangzhou firms will pair DeepSeek’s models with Unitree’s work in motion control and embodied intelligence. Each will favour the other, Unitree for training services, DeepSeek for robots. The target is the field’s hardest problem.

Can a robot “brain” make sense of an unfamiliar room and turn an instruction into a reliable action? This is the question that has haunted robotics for decades. Humans do it effortlessly, but machines struggle to combine perception, reasoning, and physical control in dynamic environments. DeepSeek and Unitree are betting that by combining their respective strengths, they can make progress on exactly this problem.

The pairing is telling. DeepSeek’s models are strong on coding, maths, and reasoning. But that strength sits in language, not in the multimodal

Source:TNW | Investors-funding News