Chinese tech companies Tencent and Alibaba are reportedly considering investing in AI company DeepSeek.

According to The Information, and citing four unnamed people with knowledge of the conversations, the companies could invest in DeepSeek at a valuation of more than $20 billion.

Although the talks are underway, both the amount of capital raised and valuation remain subject to change. The Information previously reported that DeepSeek sought at least $300m at a $10bn valuation.

Deepseek, Tencent, and Alibaba didn’t respond to the publication's requests for comment.

Should the companies invest in DeepSeek, this would parallel actions by US tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, which have heavily invested capital into US AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI.

Both Tencent and Alibaba have cloud computing divisions and have previously invested in other Chinese AI startups, including Zhipu, MiniMax, and Moonshot, while also building and offering their own AI models.

While they already offer DeepSeek's models, investment could deepen any partnership between the companies. In the US, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI gave it exclusive status as OpenAI's cloud provider until late last year, when OpenAI transitioned into a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated its contract with Microsoft.

Other investments from US big tech, including Google and Amazon, into OpenAI and Anthropic have seen commitments from the latter two to use Google's custom TPUs and Amazon's Trainium chips to train their models.

Alibaba, in addition to a cloud unit, also has a chips business called T-Head. According to the company, as of February 2026, T-Head had "cumulatively shipped" 470,000 AI chips, with more than 60 percent of T-Head chips serving external customers.

According to The Information, DeepSeek's models are currently being trained on Nvidia chips, but the company has been adapting its V4 models to run on Chinese AI chips by Huawei Technologies and Cambricon Technologies.

DeepSeek rose to prominence in early 2025 when the AI company sent waves through the US stock market with the release of its open-source LLM, which offers comparable performance to the systems produced by top US AI labs, but which was reportedly trained using a fraction of the compute power.

Questions were immediately raised about the validity of DeepSeek's claims, with OpenAI and Microsoft looking into whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s API to integrate OpenAI’s AI models into DeepSeek’s own models, and US officials reportedly investigating whether the company actually acquired more powerful Nvidia GPUs than it said via third-party companies in other countries.

Despite this, major cloud companies in the US and China alike brought DeepSeek models to their cloud platforms.