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Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has begun preparations for an initial public offering and could file listing documents as soon as this year, according to a Bloomberg report published on Tuesday.

The Hangzhou-based AI startup is planning a mainland China IPO, with a potential filing targeted for 2026 that could allow the company to debut publicly in 2027, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

DeepSeek has started discussions with accounting firms and investment banks as it advances its IPO plans, according to the report.

The company is also seeking additional private funding ahead of a potential listing, shortly after completing a reported $7 billion financing round. Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek has begun talks with prospective investors for a new funding round targeting a pre-money valuation of at least 480 billion yuan, or about $71 billion.

That valuation would represent an increase from the approximately $50 billion valuation assigned to DeepSeek during its first external financing round, which closed in early June with participation from investors including Tencent Holdings (HKG:0700, OTC:TCEHY) and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., according to Bloomberg.

DeepSeek is seeking to raise at least 10 billion yuan in additional capital, though the final amount could be significantly higher depending on investor interest, the report said.

The IPO timeline and fundraising discussions remain subject to change and could be affected by market conditions and the company’s future performance, according to the report.

Bloomberg also reported that DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has become one of the world’s wealthiest AI entrepreneurs, with his net worth reaching about $36 billion.

Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could face increasing competition in China as businesses plan to allocate a larger share of their artificial inte

Meta and Snap rolled out new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and an AI assistant onto users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, upstarts like Even Realities are muscling in on the giants.

Even Realities, a three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and previous backer Tencent; the round valued the startup at $1 billion valuation. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while rivals chase camera-equipped devices built around content capture and AI, his company is betting on display-first glasses that beam information straight into the wearer’s line of sight without giving up privacy.

Even’s earlier backers are mostly high-profile China names — Hillhouse, Sequoia China, and Northern Light Venture Capital.

Even was started by ex-Apple engineers in 2023. CEO Wang worked on the Apple Watch and iPhone; other co-founders came from tech, and two came from luxury eyewear companies, including Lindberg. The startup moved quickly, launching its first product, the G1, in 2024 as what Wang calls the lightest waveguide smart glasses then on the market.

Even blew past its own 10,000-unit target to become the first company in the category to sell more than 10,000 pairs, according to the company CEO. It raised money faster than expected, and swelled from 30–40 staff in 2024 to 300–400 today.

The startup’s latest flagship, the G2, hit the market last November and skips the camera entirely. Instead, a heads-up display built into the frames feeds information to the wearer, controlled by a companion ring, the Even R1, that users tap and swipe to navigate.

Removing the camera is an important part of Even’s privacy philosophy, though not the entire story, Wang continued. Smart glasses, he said, are probably the most personal computing device people will ever wear. Worn on the face all day, they have to feel comfortable to both the wearer and those around them, so privacy is designed into both the hardware and the software. Voice features like translation transcribe audio into text rather than storing recordings; user data is encrypted, and the infrastructure is built to meet Europe’s strict privacy standards, Wang added.

Even’s power users lean hard on Conversate, a copilot that reads a conversation in real time, explaining unfamiliar jargon or feeding follow-ups on the fly, then syncing a summary to their phone.

Still, Even has invested most heavily in optics (the display and overall optical performance), which Wang says is what separates smart glasses from other consumer electronics.

“With a phone or a watch, the display is just a conventional OLED or LCD screen. Smart glasses are the first product category to rely on optical displays, which require an entirely different technology stack; you have to design the microchip, the optics, and the waveguide together. That’s where we’ve invested the most,” Wang said.

The company developed a proprietary optical technology called Even HAO, or Holistic Adaptive Optics, an end-to-end design that integrates the microchip, waveguide and prescription support from the start, rather than combining components designed separately.  

More than half of Even’s users sit in the U.S. — its fastest-growing market — and so does the bulk of its developer community. The company doesn’t sell in China yet, even though it manufactures there across several factories; its main markets are the U.S., Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Europe. “The demand there is significant, so we want to make sure we’re prepared first,” Wang said.

Even sells near the top of the category on price and still moves real volume, making it a profitable player in the space, Wang said. “Most of our customers are male professionals between 30 and 50 years old. We ran a survey and found that about a third of our users are company executives,” he added. The frames retail for $599 before tax; prescription lenses or the ring tack on another $200–$300, pushing the average order to roughly $1,000.

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Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, with a focus on technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She previously was a financial journalist at Mergermarket covering M&A, private equity and venture capital.

Kuaishou Technology shares rose nearly 7% Friday before trimming gains, after the company announced a capital injection of nearly $2.8 billion into its artificial intelligence subsidiary, Kling AI, with backing from tech giant Tencent.

The Beijing-based short video platform disclosed the funding details in a regulatory filing released after the market closed on Thursday. The company was targeting a $15 billion valuation from the raise, Bloomberg reported.

Kuaishou shares rose as much as 6.89% at Friday's Hong Kong market open before paring gains to trade around 0.75% higher.

Tencent, which owns the generative AI platform Hunyuan, a domestic rival to Kling AI, is investing $200 million as part of the funding round, which raised a total of 19 billion yuan ($2.79 billion). The deal will dilute Kuaishou's stake to 68%.

Beyond Tencent, the funding round drew a broad consortium of backers, including 21 independent investors.

CNBC previously reported on the hype and intense competition surrounding China-based AI video generators, with Kling AI increasingly targeting growth outside its home market

Kling AI serves as a core creator studio offering AI-driven features and claims to reach more than 60 million creators globally after launching in June 2024.

Kuaishou is China's second most popular short-video platform, with a reported 700 million monthly active users spending more than 130 minutes per day with its services.

13.86K Followers

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SummaryCompaniesCXMT signed multi-year contract to supply server DRAM chipsAlso in talks with other major Chinese internet companiesMemory maker building a new Shanghai plant focused on DRAMTencent deal comes ahead of planned mega IPO in ShanghaiJune 29 (Reuters) - Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has signed a long-term supply agreement with Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), opens new tab worth ​more than 20 billion yuan ($2.94 billion) ahead of its blockbuster stock market debut, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The ‌agreement covers several years of DRAM chip supply for servers, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity as the details are private. Two of the sources said the deal spans up to three years, while the third said it covers up to five years.

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DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, is a critical component for servers that power cloud computing, databases and AI ​workloads. Modern data centres need DRAM to run applications without bottlenecking, making long-term supply contracts a priority for companies amid a prolonged global shortage ​that has led to soaring memory chip costs.

Further details of the deal were not immediately clear, including whether it includes CXMT's ⁠high-bandwidth memory (HBM), an essential component in high-performance AI chips.

CXMT and Tencent didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Founded in 2016 with government backing, CXMT leads China's strategic push ​to build a foothold in a global DRAM market dominated by South Korean and U.S. companies.

The previously unreported deal comes at a critical juncture for CXMT, which ​received approval from the Shanghai Stock Exchange in May for an initial public offering on the STAR Market that aims to raise 29.5 billion yuan, setting it up to be one of mainland China's largest listings in years.

The size of the commitment from one of China's biggest internet companies represents a major endorsement of the Hefei-based firm, which has long been viewed as ​a technological laggard compared with global leaders Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), opens new tab and SK Hynix (000660.KS), opens new tab.

CXMT is also in discussions with other major Chinese internet companies on similar collaborations, two ​additional sources said. It counts Tencent, Alibaba Cloud (9988.HK), opens new tab, ByteDance, Lenovo (0992.HK), opens new tab and Xiaomi (1810.HK), opens new tab as major customers, according to its IPO prospectus.

EXPLOSIVE GROWTHThe Tencent deal reflects a broader shift in China's technology ‌supply chain, ⁠as domestic internet giants scramble for memory chip supply amid a global shortage.

DRAM contract prices surged roughly 95% quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2026, according to UBS, with the investment bank forecasting the memory upcycle to continue until at least late 2027. The global memory market could reach $786 billion this year and $1.2 trillion in 2027, UBS estimates.

CXMT, the world's fourth-largest DRAM maker with approximately 7.7% market share in 2025, has ridden the upcycle to explosive growth. Its first-quarter revenue hit 50.8 billion ​yuan, up 700% year-on-year, while it ​recorded a net profit of 25 ⁠billion yuan, compared with a 1.6 billion yuan loss a year earlier.

Long-term agreements with price bands and pre-payments have become increasingly common across the industry as large cloud computing companies — known as hyperscalers — seek to lock in supply, with some committing ​more than 50% of their volumes over three-to-five-year terms, the UBS note said.

DOUBLING CAPACITYCXMT is aggressively expanding production capacity ​to capitalise on the ⁠upcycle, according to two of the sources and an additional source.

In addition to its existing Shanghai facility focused on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging, CXMT has begun building a new DRAM plant in the city, two of those sources said.

CXMT currently has two 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants — or fabs - in Hefei and one in Beijing, with a combined capacity ⁠of about 300,000 ​wafers per month.

With the new Shanghai facility and other new capacity, CXMT will double its ​DRAM wafer output to approximately 600,000 wafers per month, all three sources added.

The company, however, faces challenges. CXMT experienced low production yields on its DDR5 next-generation memory products in the first quarter, one of ​the sources said, a reminder of the technology gap that still separates it from established global players.

($1 = 6.7982 Chinese yuan)

Reporting by Reuters newsrooms; Editing by Kevin Buckland

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Tencent on Monday said it is testing an AI assistant within WeChat in China as the tech giant looks to step up efforts to challenge rivals in the country's competitive artificial intelligence market.

Xiaowei, "a native AI assistant," is being tested "on a small scale" in Weixin, the Chinese version of WeChat, Tencent said in a statement translated by CNBC.

Users can interact with Xiaowei with text or voice, communicate with friends and launch "mini-programs," Tencent added. Mini-programs are apps that run inside of WeChat.

Tencent executives have been mulling further integration of AI into WeChat since last year, with investors watching closely to see if this can be a new revenue stream and a way to monetize AI.

watch now

WeChat and Weixin have more than 1.4 billion monthly active users combined, with the majority in China. It is an indispensable part of daily life in China, where people use the app to message friends, make payments, book restaurants and much more.

By integrating an AI tool into an app with a huge user base, Tencent has an opportunity to capture a large number of them for its services.

"Putting an assistant inside Weixin is the first time Tencent uses the advantage it has held all along, and that matters a lot," Howard Yu, the LEGO professor of management and innovation at IMD, told CNBC by email.

"A standalone chatbot gives you an answer. An assistant wired into Weixin completes the task. And it's this second advantage that no rival can copy," Yu added.

The company did not give further details about the capabilities Xiaowei would have or what AI models it is based on.

Tech companies are talking up the potential of so-called AI agents, which they see as digital assistants that are able to carry out complex tasks on a user's behalf across different apps and services.

The new AI assistant is part of a bigger move from Tencent to challenge rivals like Alibaba, DeepSeek and Zhipu in China, which has become an incredibly competitive AI market. This year, Tencent poached an OpenAI researcher to become its chief AI scientist.

Tencent also develops its own family of models under the brand name Hunyuan.

SAN LEANDRO, Calif., June 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quino Energy, a company developing water-based organic flow batteries, has been selected by Tencent for a grant, under its CarbonX program, to fund development of a MWh-scale battery system to demonstrate reliable clean energy generation for Himandhoo Island in the Maldives. The battery will be integrated into a larger microgrid featuring floating PV generation financed by the Asian Development Bank and will complement the ongoing Preparing Outer Islands for Sustainable Energy Development (POISED) project that will install terrestrial PV and lithium-ion batteries on the island.

The Quino Energy battery will provide the microgrid with essential energy storage capabilities to slash reliance on expensive imported diesel to generate electricity, reducing costs while providing a resilient power supply to the island. This energy supply will be critical to the island community’s safety and ability to continue daily operations in the face of extreme weather or fluctuating energy demands.

The project will be supported by Atri Energy Transition, which led Quino Energy’s Series A fundraising round in October 2025. They will be collaborating with Quino Energy to manufacture the proprietary organic electrolyte in nearby Pune, India, and will also provide Operations and Maintenance (O&M) support for the battery system at Himandhoo Island for at least five years after commissioning. Suqian Time Energy Storage will provide the flow battery hardware, and EPC and island microgrid specialist Sinosoar will take charge of installation, construction, and integration. Earlier in the month, the entire project team visited Himandhoo Island and met with representatives from the local council, as well as other representatives from the Maldives Ministry of Climate Change, Environment, and Energy in the capital, Malé.

“Quino Energy is immensely grateful for the support from the Tencent CarbonX program to enable us to demonstrate our organic flow battery in a setting that can directly benefit a community,” said Eugene Beh, CEO and cofounder of Quino Energy. “This represents the first commercial deployment of the organic flow battery technology, in addition to government-supported projects we previously announced. The collaboration showcases how Quino’s technology will continue to enable cooperation between parties from across the world to rapidly advance the next generation of flow batteries.”

“We’d like to extend our congratulations to Quino Energy and all the stakeholders of this project,” said S. Kishore, founder of Atri Energy Transition. “The selection of Quino by Tencent for the CarbonX Award is an endorsement of organic electrolyte chemistry. We are happy to be part of the transition of this chemistry from pilot to commercial scale.”

CEO Eugene Beh will attend the CarbonX Award Ceremony today, June 24, organized by TED Countdown, in tandem with London Climate Action Week to accept this grant.

In the past 18 months, Quino Energy closed its series A funding round, led by Atri Energy Transition, received a $10M grant from the California Energy Commission and secured $5M in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Critical Facility Energy Resilience (CiFER) program to support a 5 MWh flow battery deployment in Southern California. Quino Energy also signed a Joint Development Agreement with Jena Flow Batteries, whose parent company Suqian Time Energy Systems is the flow battery hardware provider for the Himandhoo project.

中文版

About Quino Energy
Formed in 2021, Quino Energy is a start-up company that is developing water-based flow batteries that store electrical energy in organic molecules called quinones, for commercial and grid applications. These batteries are predicted to enjoy a unique combination of low capital cost, true fire safety, rapid scalability, and local manufacturability. This is made possible by a number of technological breakthroughs, some of which were first discovered at Harvard University and later licensed by Quino Energy. Please visit quinoenergy.com for more details on the team and the technology.

For media inquiries: [email protected]

About CarbonX
The CarbonX Program was initiated in 2023 by Tencent, together with industry, investment, and ecosystem partners. It is dedicated to supporting emerging low-carbon technologies with substantial catalytic funding and resources. Now in its second phase, CarbonX 2.0 focuses on cutting-edge CCUS, carbon removal, and long-duration energy storage technologies, and solicits proposals from early-stage teams around the world. It aims to build first-of-its kind pilot projects in real industrial settings, incubate high-potential startups, and support capacity building projects. Visit the CarbonX website for further information on the program.

About Tencent
Tencent is a global technology and entertainment company focused on creating connections and experiences that matter. Founded in 1998, Tencent is driven by its mission to create "Value for Users" and apply "Tech for Good".

Tencent's communication and social services connect more than one billion people around the world, helping them to keep in touch with friends and family, access transportation, pay for daily necessities, and even be entertained. Tencent also develops and publishes some of the world's most popular video games and other high-quality digital content, delivering rich and immersive interactive entertainment experiences. Tencent also offers a range of services such as cloud computing and other enterprise services to support our clients' digital transformation and business growth. Headquartered in Shenzhen, Tencent has been listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since June 2004.

Core headline earnings are expected to increase between 19% to 28% reflecting strong revenue growth and profitability across its businesses, most notably Tencent.

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NEXON Co., Ltd. (Nexon) (3659.TO), a global leader in online games, today announced a ten-year renewal to the long-standing partnership with Tencent in publishing Nexon's flagship PC action RPG Dungeon&Fighter in China. Terms of the agreement were not released. “Dungeon&Fighter players in China will be pleased to know that Nexon and Tencent have signed a long-term agreement to provide another decade of great experiences in their favorite PC game,” said Junghun Le.

The collaboration supports ARKIE AI's platform development across compute, hosting, and storage infrastructure. Bangkok, Thailand--(Newsfile Corp. - May 18, 2026) - ARKIE AI, an AI-native application ecosystem platform, today announced a partnership with Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, to support its growing cloud infrastructure needs.

Tencent (TCEHY) is upgraded to HOLD with a $76/share target, reflecting a 24% upside as it pivots to an AI-first strategy. 1Q26 results highlight robust cash flow from gaming and advertising, funding aggressive AI investment without compromising the balance sheet. AI initiatives include a rebuilt foundational model team, major capex increases, and rapid adoption of enterprise AI tools like WorkBuddy and QClaw.

SHENZHEN, China, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Tencent Music Entertainment Group ("TME," or the "Company") (NYSE: TME and HKEX: 1698), the leading online music and audio entertainment platform in China, today announced that it will hold its annual general meeting of shareholders (the "AGM") at 10/F, The Hong Kong Club Building, 3A Chater Road, Central, Hong Kong on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 at 10 a.m. (Beijing/Hong Kong time) for the purposes of considering and, if thought fit, passing the resolutions as set forth in the notice of the AGM (the "AGM Notice").

Tencent Music is positioned for ecosystem expansion following the regulatory approval of its Ximalaya acquisition. TME's Q1 results beat on efficiency, but Q2 guidance is lowered due to intensifying competition and rising user churn risk. The Ximalaya deal fills the company's long-form audio gap, potentially boosting user stickiness and offsetting stagnating music subscription growth.

Tencent Holdings Limited remains a Buy, supported by robust Q1 results and strong long-term growth potential as they continue expanding in AI and Cloud. Q1 highlights include 9.1% revenue growth, 20% FCF growth, aggressive cloud/AI investment, and a 63% net cash increase. Valuation implies a solid margin of safety, with intrinsic value estimated well above current levels even under more conservative estimates.

HOUSTON, May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sino Biological, Inc. (Shenzhen Stock Exchange: 301047.SZ) has announced that its gene synthesis and cell-free protein expression workflow was used in a recent study by Tencent AI for Life Sciences Lab published in Nature Communications, enabling rapid validation of AI-designed proteins with improved activity, stability, and multifunctionality. Bridging AI Protein Design and Experimental Validation Artificial intelligence has accelerated protein amino acid sequence design, however, translating these computational designs into functional proteins remains a key challenge in protein engineering.

China is lagging the US badly in the AI race as top stocks like Alibaba, Tencent, and PDD Holdings plunge amid US stocks surge

As capital rotates into China-listed semiconductor and AI stocks, Finbold has analyzed three related companies to consider in 2026.

China's Tencent Holdings has drawn more than $6 billion in orders for its planned ​dual-currency bond, according to updated orderbook messages reviewed by ​Reuters on Tuesday.