DeepSeek's new funding draws hardware-heavy investors: CATL, SMIC, Geely among backers
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-22
A breakdown of DeepSeek's latest funding round lists ten notable shareholders, including GigaDevice (memory chips), SMIC (foundry), Lenovo (IT), IDG and CITIC (established capital), Geely (automotive) and Tencent (gaming).
@teortaxesTex observes that DeepSeek's investor pool is unusually hardware-heavy — spanning CATL, SMIC and Geely — and questions whether this is normal. The composition suggests industrial and supply-chain capital rather than typical VC money, with possible implications for DeepSeek's compute and industry alignment.
More from Venture
- A frontier AI mutual insurer: proposal to make OpenAI and Anthropic mutualize catastrophic risk — scottleibrand · 2026-10-22
- Open models now over 20% of tokens: deep dive on whether open source hurts GPU demand — dotey · 2026-10-22
- Anthropic to publicly file for IPO as early as Friday, per report — himanshustwts · 2026-10-22
- One week of vibe coding, 30,708 players in month one: Dust 2 DM game's Spawn stats — TAbrodi · 2026-10-22
- 15-year-old's free Grok-style roast bot Lunaar hits 2,000 users in 4 days — Adept_Direction2591 · 2026-10-22
- ChapterPal solo dev: AI builds any feature in 15-30 min, growth is the real bottleneck — burkov · 2026-10-22