DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare an initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market and aims to begin the process this year, according to Reuters. The company is raising fresh capital as Chinese and American AI firms rush to public markets amid rising costs, a wide valuation gap, and a fierce contest for engineers.

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The Chinese artificial intelligence company, DeepSeek, has brought in CITIC Securities to prepare an initial public offering on Shanghai's tech-focused STAR Market, and it aims to begin the process this year, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The appointment matters as it signals that companies seeking a mainland listing typically hire a securities firm to run pre-listing tutoring before they can file, so engaging DeepSeek's adviser, a step not previously reported, shows the plan is advancing. The timing of any offering, the sum the company might raise, and its target valuation have not been decided, the people said. DeepSeek and CITIC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This moves aligns with DeepSeek seeking fresh capital to pay for computing infrastructure, model development, and the recruitment and retention of talent. It is in the middle of a funding round that would value it at 500 billion yuan, about 75 billion dollars, after raising roughly 7.4 billion dollars in June at a post-money valuation above 50 billion dollars. In that round, founder Liang Wenfeng committed 20 billion yuan of his own, while Tencent and battery maker CATL put in 10 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan to become the largest external shareholders.

A Door Opens in Shanghai

In June this year, the Shanghai Stock Exchange widened its most permissive listing track to let large language model developers go public before they turn a profit, part of a push by Beijing to shift the cash-hungry research phase of AI onto public markets. The rules ask for an expected market value of at least 4 billion yuan and a credible path to commercialisation rather than existing earnings. Dozens of companies have since queued to list in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Chinese and US Firms Rush to List

The push lands amid a broader dash to public markets as the cost of competing in AI climbs. Z.ai and MiniMax both went public in Hong Kong this year, and Moonshot has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong offering. Moonshot was valued at about 50 billion dollars in a recent round, below both DeepSeek and Z.ai, which carries a market value near 54 billion dollars.

Those figures sit far beneath what American rivals expect. Anthropic, the developer of Claude, could be valued at as much as 2 trillion dollars, with a listing planned for mid-October ahead of the November midterm elections, while OpenAI has been discussed at up to 1 trillion dollars. The large difference in the valuations reflects a sharp revenue disparity, but even more, highlight the difficulty Chinese developers face in turning competitive technology into profit.

For DeepSeek, the company has lost researchers to better-funded rivals over the past year, among them Luo Fuli, an early contributor who left to lead an AI model team at Xiaomi. Liang hopes proceeds from a listing will help DeepSeek offer stronger incentives to the engineers it most wants to keep, including against competitors such as ByteDance.

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