DeepSeek's second round lands at up to $16bn
DeepSeek's second funding round has ended up roughly double what was planned. The Information reported on 23 October that the round closed at 106 billion yuan ($15.9 billion), more than twice the original 50 billion yuan target, while Bloomberg and Reuters put it at about 100 billion yuan with CATL and Tencent among the largest backers. Tencent's own news site said a few investors were still trying to get in, and DeepSeek has not commented. The striking detail is the price: Caijing reports the pre-money valuation stayed at about 500 billion yuan despite the bigger raise. If that holds, investors are buying in for compute and strategic position rather than a markup, and it gives China's most watched open-model lab one of the biggest war chests in the country's AI sector. TSN's running timeline tracks where each report disagrees.
What else matters
Washington orders DeepSeek out of civilian agencies
A US government order made public this week bars covered DeepSeek products from federal civilian procurement and requires their removal from agency systems, including some third-party implementations. Beijing, meanwhile, is consulting until 15 November on AI export controls that still leave room for open-source releases. Recode China AI has the roundup.
Beijing writes AI into its employment policy
China's State Council General Office issued guidance with 18 tasks across six areas, pairing AI-driven job creation with measures to manage displacement. It calls for new occupations, AI training, help for workers changing roles, stronger protections for gig workers, and early-warning systems for job-market disruption. Details via Recode China AI.
DeepSeek opens up its inference stack
DeepSeek released DeepInfer on 20 October, the inference framework it uses in production, supporting V4.1-Flash on both Nvidia Blackwell and Huawei Ascend 950 chips. The company says one cluster serves 155 trillion tokens a day. Running the same stack on Huawei silicon is the part export-control watchers will notice. Source.
Worth your time
Mind and Machine Weekly, 18 to 25 October is a tidy catch-up on the rest of the week, from Claude Duet and OpenAI's models arriving on Google Cloud to Nvidia's two-week DSX Pod data centre.
