Valuation: 481.4 billion! It is revealed that DeepSeek has launched the second round of financing, and the official version of V4 is coming

DeepSeek Author | Chen Junda Editor | Xinyuan ZhixiZhi reported on July 14 that today, according to the Financial Times, two people familiar with the matter revealed that DeepSeek began preliminary contact with new investors this week to discuss starting a new round of financing. The pre-money valuation is approximately US$71 billion (approximately RMB 481.39 billion), which is approximately 37% higher than its first-round financing valuation. However, the specific details of the new round of financing have not yet been finalized. This new round of financing comes only one month after DeepSeek completed its first round of financing. According to people familiar with the matter, DeepSeek completed its first round of financing around the end of May this year, with a financing amount of approximately US$7 billion (approximately RMB 47.46 billion) and a post-investment valuation of approximately US$52 billion (including newly raised funds, approximately RMB 352.57 billion). People familiar with the matter said that DeepSeek launched such intensive financing mainly to "accelerate the expansion of its computing infrastructure." In June this year, DeepSeek released the IDC data center team recruitment plan on its official website. The job description shows that the company is starting to build a GW-level computing power park, and DeepSeek's own IDC data center team is responsible for everything from planning and design, technology research and development to operation management. The investment in building a self-built data center is extremely high, and the final investment scale may reach tens of billions of yuan. For reference, in April this year, the domestic clean energy listed company Jinko Technology signed an "Investment Agreement" with the People's Government of Zhongwei City, Ningxia, and reached a cooperation intention on the 1GW computing power center project. The total planned investment of the project is approximately 24.5 billion yuan. At the same time, DeepSeek is also rumored to be promoting work related to self-developed AI inference chips. On July 7, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had started work on self-developed chips a year ago and was contacting external partners and discussing with chip design companies, wafer foundries and storage companies. Reuters quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that in recent months, DeepSeek has increased the number of recruitment of chip design engineers, but the relevant recruitment has not been through open recruitment platforms.