DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based AI model developer spun out of the Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in July 2023 by founder Liang Wenfeng. Unlike the US neocloud pack (CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe) that rents GPUs by the hour to third parties, DeepSeek runs its own fleet as a captive research resource: the Fire-Flyer 2 cluster built out from 2021 onward, roughly 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs plus a later top-up of H800 accelerators procured before US export controls tightened. The lab does not sell compute; it sells inference on its own frontier models through a low-priced API.

The company vaulted into global view in January 2025 when DeepSeek-R1 briefly displaced ChatGPT as the top free iOS download and Chinese researchers claimed a training run for the underlying V3 base model costing roughly $5.6 million, an order of magnitude below Western frontier labs. That efficiency claim, whether taken at face value or read as a narrow marginal-cost figure, triggered a one-day $600B drop in Nvidia's market cap and reframed the "how much compute do you need for a frontier model" debate. Successive releases (V3.1, V3.2, the V4-Flash and V4-Pro tiers in 2026) have kept the cadence.

DeepSeek is privately held and until 2026 was funded entirely off High-Flyer's balance sheet. In May 2026 it closed a $7B Series A at a $52B post-money valuation and began IPO preparation targeting a 2027 listing. Its distinctive posture in the neocloud/AI-infra map is that it is an operator of its own inference stack rather than a rentable cloud, and it is doing frontier model work under Chinese export-restricted silicon, which has made it both a proof point for compute-efficient training and a target of US and Australian government use bans.