Over the past year, DeepSeek has been the most unique company in China's large model industry.

It doesn't resemble a standard startup. It's not in a rush to secure financing, go public, or fit into the familiar narrative of the capital markets. While other companies are busy updating versions, pursuing commercialization, and vying for market share, DeepSeek has remained restrained. The impression Liang Wenfeng and DeepSeek have left on the outside world has always been clear: focus on developing the technology first, and everything else can wait.

However, recently, there has been a flurry of news surrounding DeepSeek's first round of financing. First, media reports claimed that DeepSeek was seeking at least $300 million in external financing, with a valuation of at least $10 billion. Subsequently, reports emerged that Alibaba and Tencent were in talks with DeepSeek, with market valuation expectations soaring to over $20 billion. At the same time, another frequently mentioned piece of news is that DeepSeek V4, which the outside world has been waiting for, has yet to be officially released.

On the surface, this seems like just another round of ordinary financing: a star AI company starts raising money, industry giants get involved, valuations rise, and market sentiment soars.

But what truly deserves attention is not whether DeepSeek will secure financing or who will ultimately invest, but rather another question: Why does a mere financing announcement cause the entire industry to quickly tense up? Why are there already crowds of people eager to get in as soon as a company opens just a crack in the door?

The answer is not complicated because today's DeepSeek is no longer just a company in the ordinary sense. It is one of the few leading general-purpose large model companies in China that has not yet been fully locked down by capital and industry giants. It is also one of the few model companies that has already proven its global influence while retaining its independence. Everyone knows that such assets are rare and will not remain available indefinitely.

Two years ago, the discussion centered more on whether China could develop large models. Today, the question has shifted to who can stay in the game, who can be valued by the market, and who can transform technological advantages into organizational and ecological advantages. DeepSeek happens to stand at the center of this transformation. On one hand, it remains one of the most representative technological samples of China's AI landscape. On the other hand, it is being drawn into a new phase of reallocating capital, talent, resources, and ecosystems.

So, no one wants to miss out on DeepSeek. On the surface, it's because it's valuable. Deeper down, it's because the competition in China's AI sector is shifting strategies. In the past, the focus was on whether models could be developed. Today, the focus is on who can retain talent, sustain spending, stabilize systems, secure resources, and occupy strategic positions. As soon as DeepSeek opens its door, everyone knows that a new phase of competition has begun.

01: Why No One Wants to Miss Out on DeepSeek

If DeepSeek is viewed merely as an AI company in the midst of financing, it's easy to underestimate its current significance.

What truly makes it rare is not just the strength of its models but that it simultaneously meets several conditions: it has proven its technological influence, garnered global attention, symbolized an independent path, and, until today, has not been truly locked down by any single party. It is the combination of these factors that has turned DeepSeek into an asset that no one wants to miss out on.

First, consider its influence.

After the release of DeepSeek R1 in early 2025, perceptions of China's large models changed significantly. Many previously assumed that Chinese companies would long be followers of U.S. companies in foundation models, especially given the constraints on high-end computing power, with the gap potentially widening. DeepSeek shattered not just a model benchmark but also a widely accepted notion: it proved that Chinese teams could develop truly globally competitive models without relying on the most expensive approaches.

More importantly, it has taken a rare path.

Over the past two years, many model companies have pursued speed, financing, valuations, and commercialization. DeepSeek is not without commercial pressure, but it has always given the impression of being a team methodically laying the groundwork rather than a company sprinting ahead. It doesn't open too many doors, offer too many explanations, or rush to deliver results to the market. This restraint itself sets it apart from most companies in the industry. People look at it and naturally feel: this is not just another AI company racing against a capital timeline; it's more of an exception.

An exception is a distinctive quality in ordinary times; at critical moments, it becomes a premium.

Because a company not yet fully defined by capital and already achieving world-class results is naturally perceived by the market as more valuable. Its worth lies not just in how much money it makes today or how much it can raise on paper but in the strong imagination it inspires. For investors, this imagination represents future valuation flexibility; for industry giants, it means the company could become an ally or a disruptive variable; for the entire industry, it means it remains one of the few samples representing that "China's AI still has other possibilities."

Now, consider its rarity.

Among China's leading general-purpose large model companies, many are already moving toward the capital markets. Zhipu and MiniMax have completed their listings, while Yuezhi Aimian is advancing its IPO. Other leading model companies are also accelerating their capitalization. In contrast, DeepSeek is one of the few leading model companies that has not yet accepted external financing, has not clearly aligned with any ecosystem, and has already achieved global influence.

When such a company begins to open its financing window, the market reaction is bound to be swift. Everyone understands that a company of DeepSeek's scale, topic popularity (public attention), and symbolic significance will not remain in limbo indefinitely. It will inevitably enter the capital system, be priced by the market, and align with a more defined position. The difference lies in who gets in first, who stays closer, and who secures a foothold while it still retains its independent imagination.

This is why, as soon as financing news about DeepSeek emerges, Alibaba, Tencent, investment firms, and market sentiment all quickly follow suit. Ultimately, no one wants to miss out on DeepSeek not because it's a trendy company but because it may be one of the most critical and rare assets in China's AI industry at this stage.

02: Why Alibaba and Tencent Both Want to Invest

The reasons behind the intense interest from industry giants like Alibaba and Tencent are more straightforward.

What Alibaba and Tencent truly care about is not how much money this investment can make in the short term but that if a company like DeepSeek is acquired by someone else first, what they stand to lose is not just a few percentage points of financial returns but a critical position in the AI era.

A few hundred million dollars in investment is not a significant sum for Alibaba and Tencent. Moreover, securing a spot on the shareholder list of such a company holds far greater significance than financial returns.

Because as AI enters its second half, model capabilities are no longer just about the models themselves; they are beginning to reallocate many things.

Models will determine whose cloud resources are more heavily utilized, who can attract more enterprise clients, whose interfaces are more widely used by developers, and whose applications are more likely to integrate cutting-edge capabilities. Looking further ahead, models may even influence future entry points across various domains—office, search, content, social, e-commerce—and determine who is better positioned to capture AI-driven opportunities. Models, cloud services, clients, traffic, and applications are increasingly being rebundled.

This means that when industry giants compete for DeepSeek, they are not just investing in a company but securing critical nodes in the future AI ecosystem for themselves.

For Alibaba, if DeepSeek can synergize with Alibaba Cloud, enterprise services, and development platforms, its position in AI infrastructure will become more stable. For Tencent, if top-tier model capabilities can integrate with its existing content, social, and application ecosystems, its entry-point advantages in the AI era will carry more weight.

So, from the outset, this is not just an offensive move but also a defensive one.

The offensive aspect is easy to understand: whoever can integrate DeepSeek into their ecosystem earlier will have the opportunity to tightly bind model capabilities with their cloud services, clients, channels, and interfaces. However, the more pressing reality is defense. What concerns industry giants most about DeepSeek is not how powerful it already is but that it remains independent. A sufficiently powerful model company that has not yet been acquired by anyone is a major variable in itself. It could become an ally or the biggest future headache for someone.

From the perspective of industry giants, the logic is simple: if they can invest, that's ideal; if they can't, they at least don't want their rivals to invest easily. Because once DeepSeek is locked down by another force, what's lost is not just a single project but proactive control over a significant portion of the future ecosystem.

This is also why valuation expectations for DeepSeek have been rapidly inflated in a short period. The market is pricing not just the company's current worth but also a scarce position. This price includes technological capabilities, industry imagination, and who gains an early advantage in the future AI landscape.

So, why do Alibaba and Tencent both want to invest in DeepSeek? The answer is actually quite simple: because everyone knows this is not an ordinary opportunity but one that, if missed, may be difficult to recover.

03: Why DeepSeek Also Has to Open This Door

If outsiders don't want to miss out on DeepSeek because of its rarity, the reasons behind DeepSeek's decision to open a crack in the door at this moment are more pragmatic.

It's not because it suddenly had a change of heart but because its original way of operating is becoming increasingly expensive.

In the past, DeepSeek could maintain its independence largely because it was supported by HF Quantitative Trading. Unlike many startups, it didn't inherently rely on financing to survive or constantly explain its commercialization progress to investors. This allowed it to sustain a rare state: a stronger research atmosphere, less commercial pressure, and a pace less resembling that of a standard startup.

However, today, this state is encountering boundaries.

The most direct pressure comes from talent.

In today's AI industry, the competition hinges on top researchers and engineers. DeepSeek previously attracted talent through technological ideals, organizational culture, and opportunities for original contributions—all valid approaches. But now, the conditions offered to top talent across the industry have become increasingly clear: higher salaries, more valuable stock options, and clearer exit paths. From late 2025 to early 2026, DeepSeek saw the departure of several core R&D leaders, including Guo Daya, Wei Haoran, Wang Bingxuan, Ruan Chong, and Luo Fuli, spanning critical technical areas such as foundation models, reasoning, OCR, and multimodal capabilities. For a company that relies on talent density, this is not ordinary turnover but an organizational issue.

And organizational issues ultimately boil down to a very practical point: stock options need a price.

Whether a startup can retain talent with stock options hinges on employees knowing roughly what those options are worth. If a company refrains from financing for extended periods, lacks external valuations, and has no market price, many equity and option grants may end up as vague promises. When external opportunities are scarce, this isn't the biggest issue; but once the industry is engaged in a bidding war for talent, such ambiguous incentives become increasingly difficult to sustain. For DeepSeek, one practical effect of financing is to provide the company with a market price, give the team clear expectations, and ensure that stock options are no longer just "potentially valuable in the future" but "roughly worth X amount now."

The second pressure comes from capital expenditures.

The biggest cost for large model companies today is no longer just training a model once but the lengthy, heavier tasks that follow: inference services, continuous iteration, long-context processing, multimodal capabilities, agent functionalities, infrastructure stability, and adapting to underlying code and chip architectures. Although DeepSeek has appeared quiet recently, it hasn't stood still. Its ongoing advancements in long-sequence processing, conditional memory, sparse attention, and its highly anticipated adaptation to domestic chips like Huawei's Ascend indicate that it is still delving deeper into foundational, engineering-heavy areas.

Such endeavors may not be flashy, but they are resource-intensive.

Especially if it truly aims to deeply adapt to domestic chips, it's not just a matter of swapping hardware but reworking many foundational elements, fine-tuning them, and reinvesting engineering resources. Such investments are not only costly but also time-consuming, with few immediately visible results for outsiders. Yet they are indispensable for staying competitive in the next phase.

The third pressure comes from the changing industry pace.

Today's competition in large models has shifted from "building a single model" to "running an entire system." Model performance is one aspect; service stability, inference supply, application deployment, and system scalability are another. Since the start of 2026, DeepSeek has experienced multiple large-scale service disruptions, including one instance where both its web and app platforms were unavailable simultaneously for approximately 12 hours. For a model company already at the industry's center, this indicates not just technical glitches but mounting pressure on its entire system and resource allocation.

Ultimately, DeepSeek's decision to open its financing window today stems not from a sudden desire to conform to its peers but from the growing difficulty of sustaining the next round of competition solely through independence and a research-focused atmosphere.

This is also the core issue Liang Wenfeng must confront. Outsiders may ask whether DeepSeek will ultimately take money from Alibaba, Tencent, or neither. For him, the hardest question may not be that. The hardest part is whether DeepSeek can remain the same company once capital truly enters. Taking money from industry giants brings more resources and a thicker safety net but inevitably redefines independence. Taking money from pure financial investors preserves more independence but may not fully address the resources they truly lack. Ultimately, it's not about choosing who provides the money but about deciding what kind of company DeepSeek will become afterward.

So, what this situation truly highlights is not just that no one wants to miss out on DeepSeek. More importantly, even DeepSeek itself has reached a point where it can no longer remain stationary. In the past, the most critical task for Chinese AI companies was to prove they could build models. Now, the more pressing task is to prove they can remain in the game long-term after achieving that milestone.

Technological breakthroughs can make a company visible, but only by being priced, organized, and supported by resources can it continue moving forward. The significance of DeepSeek's financing lies not just in Liang Wenfeng alone but in the evolving survival rules of the entire Chinese AI industry.

The cover image and illustrations in this article are sourced from the internet, with copyright attributable to (belonging to) their respective owners. This article does not constitute any investment advice.