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DeepSeek
State of play as of
China’s most influential AI lab: open-weight models, a hard bet on efficiency, and now its own inference silicon.
DeepSeek spent two years arguing that the way to beat a compute deficit was to need less compute, used better. That bet produced open-weight models that run within a few points of the best Western systems at a fraction of the cost. In 2026 the lab took its first outside money, let a state fund hold the only voting seat, and began designing its own inference chip. We track what it ships and who backs it, with dates and sources.
Fast facts
- Founded
- 2023, Hangzhou. Spun out of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer.
- Founder & CEO
- Liang Wenfeng, who also founded High-Flyer.
- Flagship model
- DeepSeek V4, open-weight under the MIT license: 1.6 trillion parameters, 1-million-token context.DeepSeek technical report, Reuters
- Latest valuation
- Roughly $52 to $59 billion, set by its first outside round in June 2026.The Information, SCMP
- Notable investor
- The state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund, the only investor with a vote.The Information, SCMP, company registry
- Compute
- Trained on Nvidia H800 early, Huawei Ascend since; V4 ships with Ascend 950 as a primary deployment path.Reuters, Leiphone
- In development
- Its own AI chip, aimed at inference rather than training.Reuters
The state of play
DeepSeek is secretly developing its own AI chip, aimed at inference rather than training. The project began roughly a year ago, and the company is in talks with chip-design houses, a foundry and memory suppliers, hiring chip engineers through private channels. It still trains on other firms’ hardware and will for a long time, but designing a chip for its own models targets the 80 to 90 percent of a model’s lifetime cost that inference represents.
DeepSeek open-sourced DSpark, a technique that speeds per-user inference on its V4 models by 60 to 85 percent, in the same fortnight a US frontier lab found a comparable efficiency gain and kept it in-house. It is the clearest example yet of DeepSeek’s standards-over-margin strategy: give away the efficiency work so its stack becomes the cheapest to run.
A SemiAnalysis teardown found part of DeepSeek V4’s architecture was co-designed for Huawei’s Ascend 950DT inference accelerator, which carries Huawei’s in-house HiZQ memory at 144GB and 4 TB/s. The model and the domestic silicon are increasingly being built for each other.
DeepSeek closed its first outside round, about 51 billion yuan (roughly $7.4 billion) at a valuation of $52 to $59 billion, the largest single AI raise in Chinese history. Founder Liang Wenfeng wrote the biggest check; the only investor with a vote is the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund. The stated uses were domestic-chip compute centers, a self-designed AI chip, and talent.
DeepSeek open-sourced V4 under the permissive MIT license with Huawei Ascend as a primary deployment path: 1.6 trillion parameters, a 1-million-token context, and coding benchmarks a hair behind the best Western models. It was the first time a Chinese chip, model and deployment stack lined up in public with no US dependency.
Our reporting on DeepSeek
- The Tell
DeepSeek is secretly building its own chip, and it targets inference, not training. You do not build an inference chip to out-Nvidia Nvidia; you build one to own the compute bill that recurs.
- The Giveaway
DeepSeek open-sourced an 85% inference speedup. OpenAI found the same trick the same fortnight and kept it secret. One bets on standards, the other on margin.
- The Co-Design
A teardown found part of DeepSeek V4’s architecture was co-designed for Huawei’s Ascend 950DT inference chip. The model and the silicon are now being built for each other.
- The Private Round
DeepSeek closed its first outside round, roughly 7.4 billion dollars at a 50-billion-plus valuation. The founder wrote the biggest check; the only investor with a vote is a state fund.
- The Week the Race Happened
DeepSeek open-sourced V4 under MIT with Huawei Ascend as a primary deployment path: 1.6 trillion parameters, million-token context, coding a hair behind the best Western models. The first sovereign stack.
- Closed in Code
A team completed what it says is the first third-party full-parameter post-training of a 1.6-trillion-parameter model on about 1,000 Huawei Ascend cards, with no instability. The penalty is efficiency, and it is shrinking.
These link to the full issues on the newsletter. New pieces go out in the daily first.
Common questions
Is DeepSeek building its own chip?
Yes. On 7 July 2026 Reuters reported that DeepSeek is secretly developing its own AI chip, aimed at inference rather than training. Sources briefed on the project said it began roughly a year earlier, and that DeepSeek is in talks with chip-design houses, a foundry and memory suppliers. The company still trains on Nvidia and Huawei hardware and will for a long time; the chip is an early, long-term bet on owning the recurring cost of running its models.
Who owns DeepSeek?
DeepSeek is majority founder-held. In June 2026 it took its first outside money, about $7.4 billion at a $52 to $59 billion valuation. Founder Liang Wenfeng wrote the biggest check, and the only investor with a vote is the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund, per The Information, SCMP and the company registry.
What is DeepSeek V4?
DeepSeek V4 is the lab’s flagship model, open-sourced under the MIT license in April 2026 with 1.6 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context. It launched with Huawei Ascend as a primary deployment path and scores a hair behind the best Western models on coding, at a fraction of the cost to run.
Does DeepSeek use Nvidia chips?
It has. DeepSeek trained on Nvidia H800 chips early and has shifted to Huawei Ascend since; V4 ships with the Ascend 950 as a primary deployment path. In July 2026 it was reported to be designing its own inference chip to reduce that dependence further.
Who founded DeepSeek?
Liang Wenfeng, who also founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. DeepSeek spun out of High-Flyer in 2023 and is based in Hangzhou.
Every dated fact above traces to a named source, and where it comes from our reporting, to the dated issue that carried it. Where a claim is self-reported or disputed, we say so.