DeepSeek, Huawei Said to Raise $17B as China Stocks Slump

DeepSeek and Huawei have lined up new money, according to Bloomberg reports published on 22 October 2026 and relayed by Reuters and The Edge Malaysia. DeepSeek raised about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion) in an equity round, and Huawei secured a 15 billion yuan ($2.25 billion) loan from Chinese banks. Both reports cite people familiar with the matter.

Together that is about 115 billion yuan, or about $17.2 billion at the exchange rates each report used: our arithmetic, adding one equity round and one bank loan. On the day the reports came out, China’s CSI 300 index was 20% below its June high, as we reported in our piece on the CSI 300 bear market.

Business Pill · SOVEREIGN AI

A short Business Engineer explainer on sovereign AI: who controls the model and the data. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about any company, bank or government in this piece.

What Was Reported

Reuters, relaying Bloomberg, says DeepSeek “has raised about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion) in its latest fundraising round”. Contemporary Amperex Technology and Tencent Holdings “were among the biggest investors in the round”. Reuters added that it “could not immediately verify the report.”

On 6 October, Investing.com summarised an earlier Bloomberg report: DeepSeek “had initially sought 50 billion yuan, but investor demand was far bigger than initially expected”. The round is now about twice that first target, as we covered in our DeepSeek round piece.

For Huawei, Bloomberg’s report, as published by The Edge Malaysia, says “The seven-year offshore yuan denominated loan was provided by six Chinese lenders, including Bank of China Ltd, China Construction Bank Corp and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd”. The proceeds “will be used for general corporate purposes”, the person added. Huawei and the three banks “didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”

The same report says it is Huawei’s first offshore syndicated borrowing since 2020, “when it raised an HK$11.8 billion (US$1.5 billion) loan”. It adds that Huawei boosted research spending “to 121 billion yuan in the first half this year”, while memory costs led to “negative cash flow of 39.9 billion yuan”.

What Was Posted on X

Bloomberg’s post on 22 October says Huawei has secured a 15 billion yuan loan from Chinese banks as spending on chips to power AI-related projects soars. It is the report behind the Huawei row in the table above; Bloomberg cites a person familiar with the matter, and Huawei did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Who Funds China’s AI Stack: The 22 October Reports

The table lists the money reported for the two companies; the dates are when the reports were published, not when the money changed hands. The selection is ours; each figure is from the source named in its row.

Why the Two Are Linked

The two companies depend on each other, according to research firm SemiAnalysis, which published an analysis on 21 October titled “The Huawei-DeepSeek Symbiosis”. It writes: “Neither can do this alone.”

SemiAnalysis puts the trade this way: “Huawei provides the hardware and native software stack; DeepSeek brings the workloads and engineering needed to make that hardware useful for its models.” It also says DeepSeek “provides Huawei with weights, supporting Day-0 optimized releases, such as DeepSeek V4 and V4.1.”

Bloomberg’s Huawei report makes a similar link. It says DeepSeek “plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei’s top accelerators at a massive data center it’s building in Inner Mongolia”, and that DeepSeek wants to buy more of Huawei’s best chips “but the company doesn’t currently have the production capacity.”

The Market Backdrop

The reports came out on a day of selling. As we reported, Bloomberg said China’s CSI 300 fell as much as 1.7% on 22 October, taking its losses from a June high to 20%, and that Chinese stocks were “dragged down by the unwinding of the global artificial intelligence trade and the lack of stimulus”. Bloomberg also said MiniMax shares erased all their gains since their January debut.

The Structural Read

As we read it, the two deals finance two layers of one stack. SemiAnalysis writes that “Huawei provides the hardware and native software stack; DeepSeek brings the workloads and engineering needed to make that hardware useful for its models.”

As we read it, the constraint in Bloomberg’s account is chip supply rather than money: DeepSeek wants more of Huawei’s best chips, Bloomberg says, “but the company doesn’t currently have the production capacity.”

As we read it, the risk SemiAnalysis names is concentration: it writes that “the partnership could work extremely well for DeepSeek without making Ascend equally usable for everyone else.”

Three Implications

FOR CHIP MAKERS Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei’s top accelerators at a data centre in Inner Mongolia, which, as we read it, gives Huawei’s chips a large anchor customer.

FOR INVESTORS As we read it, the contrast is timing: the reports of new equity and bank money were published on the day Bloomberg said the CSI 300 was 20% below its June high.

FOR READERS OF THESE REPORTS As we read it, both deals rest on people familiar with the matter, so the next confirmation would be a statement from DeepSeek, Huawei or the lenders.

The Business Engineer Lens

This story maps onto the Business Engineer framework The Nine Layers of AI.

The framework argues that “the AI economy is not a list of companies racing each other.”

As we read it, these reports show a model layer and a chip layer being financed side by side. The framework was published in May 2026 and does not discuss DeepSeek’s round or Huawei’s loan.

What Is Not Established

Neither company has confirmed the figures in the reports we read. The DeepSeek round and the Huawei loan are both reported through people familiar with the matter, and Reuters says it could not verify the DeepSeek report. Later wire headlines relayed by Walter Bloomberg, citing sources, put DeepSeek’s pre-money valuation for the round at $74 billion. The $17.2 billion total adds an equity round to a bank loan, two different kinds of money, and is our arithmetic.

SemiAnalysis’ view of where DeepSeek’s computing will run in future is its own forecast. Bloomberg’s article and SemiAnalysis’ full analysis are the primary texts; we read Bloomberg through The Edge Malaysia’s republication.

Connecting the Coverage

On 19 October, The Information reported that DeepSeek is helping shape Huawei’s future AI chips, as we covered in our piece on DeepSeek and Huawei’s chips. The same day, a notice of a US Department of Homeland Security order removing DeepSeek products from civilian agencies was filed for public inspection, which we reported in our piece on the US DeepSeek order. On 20 October, China’s Commerce Ministry said China will “take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests in response to any action that substantively harms China’s interests,” as we covered in our piece on China’s response.

What’s new today, as we read it, is the money: one equity round and one bank loan reported on the same day, with Chinese banks and Chinese companies named as the funders.

The Bottom Line

As we read it, the reported funders are all domestic: a battery maker and a platform company for DeepSeek, and six Chinese banks for Huawei. In reports published on a day China’s stock index was 20% below its June high, the private and bank money went to the two companies SemiAnalysis describes as each supplying “exactly what the other lacks”.