Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in active talks to participate in DeepSeek’s first institutional funding round, according to a Bloomberg report published on April 24, 2026. The round values the Chinese AI startup at over $20 billion.
Tencent has proposed acquiring up to a 20% stake in the company, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. DeepSeek is reportedly reluctant to give up that level of control. Alibaba is also engaged in funding discussions, though the terms it has proposed remain unclear.
The Valuation Benchmark
The $20 billion-plus figure is benchmarked against publicly traded rivals. MiniMax Group Inc., in which both Tencent and Alibaba already hold stakes, currently trades at around $40 billion, according to Bloomberg. The Information previously reported that DeepSeek was seeking to raise more than $300 million at a valuation of at least $20 billion, per VARIndia.
Talks remain fluid. No deal has been finalized and the valuation could still change. Representatives for DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.
Why It Matters Now
The funding talks come at a critical inflection point for DeepSeek. On the same day as the Bloomberg report, the startup released its V4 model family, including V4-Pro (1.6 trillion parameters, 1 million token context window) and the cheaper V4-Flash variant, according to Fortune.
DeepSeek’s V4-Pro API pricing sits at $3.48 per million output tokens, compared to $30 for OpenAI and $25 for Anthropic, per Fortune. The company expects prices to drop further when Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips scale up production in the second half of 2026.
DeepSeek is owned by hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, co-founded by Liang Wenfeng, who established the AI startup in 2023. The company has never taken outside capital before this round.
China’s AI Consolidation Race
Both Tencent and Alibaba are vying for positioning as the dominant cloud and AI infrastructure providers in China. Tencent recently committed to doubling its AI investments to over 36 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) in 2026, per Bloomberg. Alibaba reorganized last month to consolidate all AI services into a single business unit.
As cloud providers, both companies stand to gain from supplying compute to DeepSeek regardless of who wins the equity stake. The startup’s model development requires massive data center capacity, and an investment would lock in a long-term cloud customer relationship.
For DeepSeek, the question is how much independence it can maintain while accessing the capital it needs to compete with U.S. labs spending tens of billions annually on compute. The Straits Times noted that American tech giants are projected to invest around $650 billion in AI infrastructure and data centers in 2026 alone.