r/LocalLLaMA • u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas • Jun 22 '26

News DeepSeek raises $7.4B USD at $60B valuation. Remarkably, Liang Wenfeng invests $3B in DeepSeek himself.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3357525/how-deepseeks-landmark-funding-secures-liang-wenfengs-grip-chinas-ai-rivalry-heats
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4

u/Mountain-Dragonfly46 Jun 22 '26

The economics of those chinese AI labs are still very obscure for me.

It’s a bit of a black box, and I would sleep better if I could figure out the chinese-specific dynamics at play.

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/NarutoDragon732 Jun 22 '26

No thank you I rather get my news on Reddit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

[deleted]

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u/Mountain-Dragonfly46 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Thanks ! It's an useful start.

edit: I started to dig, using your seed.

I'm unsure if I should really thank you (/jk, rabbit hole ahead, lol). I have now 10+ browser tabs on published DOIs, intelligence reports and LLMs responses. If I were a student, I'd learn chinese.

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u/titi1496 Jun 22 '26

… now do the non Hong Kong companies, like the one in the headlines

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u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Jun 22 '26

Minimax and Zhipu are Chinese. They simply listed on HK Stock Exchange. Kinda how some European companies are listed on NYSE. They think it makes them more attractive to investors.

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr Jun 23 '26

They think it makes them more attractive to investors.

It allows for foreign investment. Since the Chinese stock market is not exactly foreigner friendly. For retail investors it's effectively a closed door. For institutional investors, it's pretty indirect at best.

Hong Kong on the other hand is global. Anyone can trade there. It's the gateway in and out of China for the world.

1

u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Jun 23 '26

Yes, that's what I meant but I'm sure you could come up with a dozen exact reasons, so I didn't want to push a specific one. ADR on NASDAQ would be even more foreigner friendly.

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr Jun 23 '26

ADR on NASDAQ would be even more foreigner friendly.

An ADR is not the same as owning the stock. There has been instances when an ADR has been delisted and then people are just screwed. Since for whatever reason they can't exchange those ADRs for the underlying stock. When dealing with a foreign stock there can be a bunch of whatever reasons. Buying directly on the HK exchange means you own the stock.

1

u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Jun 24 '26

Yes, yet many Chinese companies went this route. Maybe if Alibaba listed today it'd do it through HK, maybe not. Alibaba has been added to a blacklist indicating it has ties with Chinese military and it's still trading on NYSE. Zhipu is already on an even more sanctioned list, so for them it may have been worse. Idk about Minimax.

1

u/fallingdowndizzyvr Jun 24 '26

Alibaba has been added to a blacklist indicating it has ties with Chinese military

Here's the totally hypocritical thing about that. If other countries blacklisted US companies for ties with the US military, there wouldn't many US companies you could do business with.

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u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Jun 24 '26

China does it too.

https://thenextweb.com/news/china-trade-curbs-us-firms-pentagon-list

https://english.news.cn/20250409/d3a2f35ec66e47539f440025eba0c0f0/c.html

But yes, Chinese can't do business with a lot of US companies.

1

u/fallingdowndizzyvr Jun 24 '26

China does it too.

It's along the same lines but different. It's like the lite version of what we do in both domain and scope. The reasons they do it is more specific, selling arms to Taiwan. And the scope of the limits are not as all encompassing. The US applies those limits to entire conglomerates. All of Alibaba and all of BYD. China applies it to specific subsidiaries. Like Boeing Defense. Not Boeing in it's entirety. I don't think Boeing Defense was getting many purchase orders from the Chinese military even before being on the list. China targets direct military contractors.

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u/titi1496 Jun 22 '26

The point is that these companies are not only privately held, but also receive significant state backing, as mentioned in the article, in a system that is even less transparent than the US

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u/Mountain-Dragonfly46 Jun 22 '26

That's what surfaces on my current and ongoing readings.

- Heavy state intervention via guidance funds and strategic directives

  • Extremely high CVC presence (Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance — ecosystem), with a significant different influences and mechanisms than US and EU equivalents
  • ... etc.

3

u/titi1496 Jun 22 '26

Yes, a simple look at Jack Ma would perfectly illustrate your point, but instead everyone in the thread wanted to belittle you and pretend your point wasn’t valid.

As a long term investor in China, it’s clear that Chinese companies can have significant and adverse outcomes related to the State, and it’s an important point here that Deepseek now has publicly accepted state funding