DeepSeek’s $7.4bn raise is one symptom of China’s AI cash surge

China’s AI sector is not short of cash. If anything, American pressure is pumping more in.

DeepSeek shows the pattern best. The Hangzhou lab closed a $7.4bn round, the biggest first-time raise by a Chinese startup, at a valuation above $50bn. It had run for three years on founder Liang Wenfeng’s own wealth and never touched outside money. The Information reports what changed his mind: Anthropic’s April preview of Mythos, a model so capable it can find and exploit software flaws.

The Mythos effect

Liang concluded that matching Mythos-class models would take a far bigger war chest of data and compute. So he raised one. DeepSeek closed the round through a partnership he controls, with a five-year lockup that keeps him firmly in charge. The irony is sharp. A US campaign of export limits and model bans, aimed at slowing China, instead pushed its strongest lab to amass the...

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