Photo Credit: Solen Feyissa
DeepSeek is reportedly poised to raise as much as $15 billion, with Tencent among the gargantuan round’s leading participants.
The massive figure just recently entered the stateside media spotlight; CNBC and others attributed the high-end total to anonymous sources as opposed to the Hangzhou-based startup itself.
Per these unidentified individuals, the AI giant initially set out to raise CNY 50 billion (currently $7.5 billion) and will now pull down “at least” CNY 80 billion/$11.9 billion.
Perhaps more interesting than the round’s size are the aforementioned leading participants: battery maker CATL and the previously noted Tencent Music parent. Especially because the latter company’s streaming platforms (Kugou, Kuwo, and QQ) have been working to capitalize on AI features – including by partnering with DeepSeek – the raise will presumably set the stage for deeper collaborations.
“[W]e adopted the DeepSeek LLM to help evaluate content quality and improve recommendation precision with user preferences,” Tencent Music noted during its Q1 2025 earnings call.
Time will tell what said collaborations look like in practice, but Tencent Music has long been emphasizing personalization and superfan offerings.
Furthermore, with Tencent’s WeChat/Weixin having rather unsurprisingly been factoring into QQ, Kuwo, and Kugou for a while, Tencent Music execs during their most recent earnings call confirmed the integration of the social platform’s XiaoWei AI agent.
“We are pleased that by tapping into Weixin’s massive user base, more users can now discover songs, generate playlists, stream music with easy commands, and instantly share favorite tracks with friends,” the company continued.
Then there’s Tencent Music’s MusicBuddy AI product (which is said to handle “everything from inspiration and creation to editing, distribution, and promotion”) and the distinct Vemus generation platform (“AI helps you instantly become a creative genius,” its description reads), to name a couple more.
Put differently, Tencent Music (and Tencent proper) already has quite a lot going on at the intersection of AI and music, and it’ll be worth keeping an eye out for expanded DeepSeek integrations.
As this relates to the broader industry, China’s rapidly expanding recorded music market isn’t a secret – nor are major music conglomerates’ aggressive pushes to score a piece of the quick-growing pie.
Furthermore, Beijing’s stakes in and sweeping regulatory sway over leading Chinese tech companies is also well known at this stage of the game. (On the straight capital front, state-backed funds are said to be kicking in a substantial portion of DeepSeek’s current round, which will precede an anticipated early 2027 IPO in Shanghai.)
At the intersection of all those points, China-based AI music platforms have the benefit of grappling with noticeably less intense (i.e., nonexistent) rights-related scrutiny than their stateside counterparts, particularly when it comes to the materials on which they trained.