DeepSeek Is Preparing a Shanghai IPO at a $75 Billion Valuation

DeepSeek has engaged CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR Market, Reuters reported this week, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. The Hangzhou-based AI company is aiming to begin the formal listing process within 2026, with a public debut potentially following in 2027.

At the same time, the company is seeking fresh capital in a pre-IPO round that would value it at approximately 500 billion yuan — equivalent to roughly $71–75 billion — a significant step up from the $50–52 billion valuation established just three months ago.

DeepSeek’s Rise — and Why It Matters

DeepSeek came to global attention in January 2025 when it released its R1 and V3 models — open-source AI systems that delivered performance comparable to leading US models at dramatically lower training cost. The release sent Nvidia’s stock down 17% in a single day, wiped roughly $600 billion from US tech market caps, and forced a recalibration of assumptions about how much compute was actually required to train frontier AI.

Since then, DeepSeek has continued releasing models while rapidly expanding its commercial revenue. The Information reported that DeepSeek generated approximately 475 million yuan — around $70 million — in revenue during the first seven months of 2026, roughly ten times its full-year 2025 revenue. It is still loss-making, with a net loss of approximately 715 million yuan over the same period, as it invests heavily in computing infrastructure, model research, and its own chip development programme.

The Capital It’s Raising and Why

DeepSeek completed its first major external funding round in June 2026, raising approximately $7.4 billion with participation from Tencent Holdings and Contemporary Amperex Technology. Weeks later, it began discussing a second round at a substantially higher valuation — but suspended those discussions in July after private comments attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng circulated online and created reputational friction. The pre-IPO round is now proceeding under the CITIC Securities engagement.

The capital is going toward three areas: computing infrastructure — DeepSeek needs more chips to train larger models and serve growing inference demand; AI model development — it remains in a competitive race with Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, and increasingly against US labs whose models it has been benchmarked against; and its own in-house chip programme — a strategic priority that reflects China’s broader push to build a domestic AI hardware supply chain independent of US export controls.

What a Shanghai Listing Means — and Doesn’t

Choosing Shanghai’s STAR Market rather than Hong Kong or the US has strategic implications. In China, companies pursuing a mainland listing must first engage a securities firm for a “tutoring” period before filing — a regulatory preparation process that can take months. CITIC Securities’ engagement begins that process.

A domestic listing makes DeepSeek’s shares accessible to mainland Chinese retail investors and institutional funds, deepening the company’s roots in the Chinese capital markets ecosystem. It also keeps the company firmly within Beijing’s regulatory orbit — a relevant consideration for a company whose technology sits at the intersection of AI capability and national security concerns in China.

For international investors, access to a STAR Market listing is more restricted than a US or Hong Kong offering, but not impossible through certain cross-border investment channels. The more significant constraint is that DeepSeek’s models — particularly its open-source releases — have faced scrutiny from US regulators over potential misuse in AI systems, which could create friction around any international institutional participation.

The Context: AI IPO Wave Reaches China

DeepSeek’s IPO preparations arrive as the global AI IPO wave — which has already produced SpaceX’s $75 billion Nasdaq debut and is bringing OpenAI and Anthropic to market this autumn — extends to Chinese markets. A Tencent-backed Nvidia rival tripled on its Shanghai debut this week, signalling that Chinese public markets have significant appetite for AI-related listings.

If DeepSeek successfully lists at a $75 billion valuation, it would become the most valuable Chinese AI company to go public domestically — and a clear signal that the Chinese AI industry can access capital and credibility through its own financial markets rather than depending on US listings. That’s a strategic outcome Beijing has been working toward as US-China tech tensions have made cross-border listings more complicated for Chinese technology companies.

For more context on the global AI IPO wave, see our coverage of the OpenAI IPO filing and our earlier breakdown of China’s $295 billion AI infrastructure plan — the broader strategic context that makes DeepSeek’s public ambitions make sense.

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