Credit: Canva
DeepSeek spent early 2025 proving that a good AI model did not have to cost a fortune. This week it has been busy proving it can spend one. In a handful of days, the Chinese lab reopened a multi-billion-dollar fundraising. It took a stake in the country’s best-known robot maker. And it told customers it would charge them more.
An $8bn round, reopened
DeepSeek has restarted its second funding round, seeking close to $8bn, Bloomberg reported. The raise values the Hangzhou startup at about 500 billion yuan, or $74bn. Monolith Management, an early backer of the Chinese AI champion Moonshot, is in talks to join.
The round is a restart, not a fresh start. DeepSeek paused the process last month after leaked remarks from founder Liang Wenfeng to investors caused friction. The valuation has climbed since its first external round earlier this summer. That round closed near 350 billion yuan and roughly doubled Liang’s net worth to about $36bn.
The company wants to raise about as much again. Discussions are ongoing, Bloomberg cautioned, and the size, timing, and investor list can still change.
What the money is for marks the real shift. DeepSeek plans to spend part of it building its own data centres, led by a large facility in Inner Mongolia. The lab that made its name on efficiency now needs its own compute. On the same day the round resurfaced, it also warned users of a significant price rise. DeepSeek is quietly rewriting its own cheap-AI story.
A robot bet in the same week
The second move points somewhere new. DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan, about $20.8m, in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai listing, Reuters reported from a stock-exchange filing. The stake buys 2.31% of the offering’s strategic placement, with a 36-month lock-up. It reads as a commitment, not a trade.
Alongside it sits a pact to jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots. The two Hangzhou firms will pair DeepSeek’s models with Unitree’s work in motion control and embodied intelligence. Each will favour the other, Unitree for training services, DeepSeek for robots. The target is the field’s hardest problem.
Can a robot “brain” make sense of an unfamiliar room and turn an instruction into a reliable action?
The pairing is telling. DeepSeek’s models are strong on coding, maths, and reasoning. But that strength sits in language, not in the multimodal systems that read the physical world. Its VL2 vision research was never folded into the flagship. A separate visual-reasoning project appeared and then vanished in April without explanation.
Unitree offers the missing half, robots and the scarce physical-world data they generate.
A rich price for the hardware
Unitree priced its IPO on Thursday, the payoff of a listing TNW has tracked since its earlier 50-billion-yuan target. It will raise about 6.1 billion yuan, or $904m, at a valuation near $9bn, Reuters reported. That makes it the first humanoid-robot maker to list on the mainland. Backers already include vehicles tied to Tencent, Alibaba, and China Mobile.
The numbers are steep. At 150.80 yuan a share the offering carries a price-to-earnings ratio of 219.
The industry average is near 39, according to Chinese outlet Cailian Press. Revenue more than quadrupled to 1.7 billion yuan in 2025, and humanoids became the biggest line. But first-quarter profit, stripped of one-offs, fell 52.6% as research and marketing costs climbed. US sales, 13.3% of last year’s revenue, sit exposed to fresh American curbs on Chinese robots.
Put the three moves together and a pattern shows. The company that proved AI could be cheap is now raising billions, building data centres, and charging more. It is also buying into machines that move.
DeepSeek is betting that the next phase will not be cheap at all. Whether the market that fell for the discount will pay the new price is the open question.
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