Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s annualised revenue run rate has reached about $1 billion, more than double from under $500 million a few months earlier, The Information reported, citing two people with direct knowledge of remarks CEO Liang Wenfeng made to investors. Reuters relayed the account but said it could not immediately verify the figures, and DeepSeek did not confirm them.
The jump is a run-rate measure—what the company would make in a year if the current pace held—not audited trailing-twelve-month revenue. Coverage attributed part of the increase to API price hikes of roughly 2.3 times to 4.5 times; Liang told investors demand held, according to those reports. Mid-summer analyst work from Rhodium Group had put DeepSeek’s ARR near $500 million, consistent with the “under $500 million” baseline before the doubling.
DeepSeek is also finalizing a second fundraising round targeting about ¥50 billion, or roughly $7.5 billion, at a valuation of ¥500 billion (about $75 billion), aiming to finish by the end of October, The Information reported via Reuters. That target is separate from a roughly $7.4 billion round closed in June, after which some investor filings suggested a lower mark near ¥351 billion. The company has also engaged CITIC Securities for possible Shanghai STAR Market IPO tutoring; Reuters sources said timing, size, and valuation remain undecided.
The scale narrative sits on a constrained compute stack. US export controls limit advanced Nvidia chips for China; Bloomberg reported DeepSeek plans a large Huawei Ascend order for inference while still relying on Nvidia for training. Domestic rivals—ByteDance, Alibaba’s Qwen line, Z.ai, Moonshot, MiniMax—and open-weight pricing keep monetization thinner than US frontier labs. Rhodium has argued Chinese model ARR remains a fraction of OpenAI and Anthropic combined, and that some China valuations look rich versus revenue.
Reported $1 billion run-rate and a $7.5 billion pre-IPO target sell a scale story. The ARR is source-attributed, price-hike-boosted, and unverified; the raise is not closed; and export controls plus a crowded domestic field still decide how durable those numbers are.