DeepSeek Taps CITIC to Take Its AI Lab Public
2 min readThe Chinese lab that rattled global markets in early 2025 is preparing to sell shares to the public. DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to guide a listing on Shanghai STAR Market, the mainland exchange built for technology companies, and wants to start the process before the end of this year.
How DeepSeek got here
DeepSeek is based in Hangzhou and spun out of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. It became a household name when its R1 reasoning model matched far more expensive Western systems at a fraction of the reported training cost, a result that briefly knocked hundreds of billions of dollars off US chip stocks.
Since then the company has stayed unusually private for its profile. It has taken no conventional venture path, published its models openly, and said little about revenue. A stock exchange listing would change all of that.
What the DeepSeek IPO involves
Appointing a securities firm is the first formal step toward a mainland listing. Chinese rules require what is called pre-listing tutoring, a supervised preparation period in which the sponsoring broker gets the company ready for regulatory review. That is the stage DeepSeek is entering with CITIC, the country largest investment bank.
Reporting also points to a pre-IPO funding round that would value DeepSeek at roughly 500 billion yuan, or about 75 billion US dollars. The timing of the offering, the amount the company would raise and the final valuation are all still undecided.
Why it matters
A DeepSeek listing would be the first time a leading Chinese AI lab opens its books. Revenue, margins, compute spending and customer concentration would move from rumor to filed disclosure, which is useful for anyone trying to judge how the economics of Chinese AI actually compare with OpenAI or Anthropic.
It also fits a policy pattern. Beijing has pushed strategic technology firms toward domestic exchanges rather than New York, and the STAR Market exists to keep that capital at home. Listing there gives DeepSeek access to funding for chips and data centers without the exposure that a US listing now carries.
Watch for the tutoring filing itself, which is public, and for whatever the prospectus eventually reveals about how a lab known for cheap models actually makes money.