BEIJING, June 17 — Investors have valued Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek at more than US$50 billion (RM203 billion) in the company’s first fundraising round, reports said.

The firm released its latest AI model in April, having stunned the world in 2025 with a low-cost chatbot that matched the power of US rivals.

It recently raised more than 50 billion yuan, the Wall Street Journal and The Information said this week, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

That values the company at more than US$50 billion, they said. DeepSeek did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.

Training and running cutting-edge AI models is an expensive business, requiring billions of dollars in computing infrastructure.

But despite their grand ambitions, for now the world’s biggest AI companies are loss-making ventures trying to work out how to turn a profit in the future.

Washington says DeepSeek’s latest model — among China’s most advanced — is about eight months behind the top offerings from US companies.

US startup Anthropic is valued at US$965 billion following a US$65 billion fundraising round, while ChatGPT-maker OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in March.

Both US firms have filed to go public in recent weeks — suggesting the process of raising record amounts of private investment may have reached its limits.

The Wall Street Journal and The Information said DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng made the biggest investment of the round at around 20 billion yuan.

Liang has set up an unusual fundraising structure that allows him to retain control of DeepSeek through a limited partnership that he manages, they said.

The outlets added that China’s government-backed National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund also invested around one billion yuan directly into DeepSeek.

Other investors reportedly included Chinese tech giant Tencent, e-commerce firm JD.com, battery maker CATL and video game publisher NetEase. All the companies declined to comment or did not reply to AFP.

DeepSeek’s systems are open-source — meaning their inner workings are public, allowing programmers to customise parts of the software to suit their needs.

But like other Chinese chatbots, DeepSeek’s AI tools eschew topics usually censored in the world’s second-largest economy, such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. — AFP