DeepSeek is in early talks for a new funding round at a $71 billion pre-money valuation.

Released DSpark speculative decoding framework

Began developing custom inference ASICs to cut GPU dependency

China's domestic AI chip budget share rises to 46%, driven by DeepSeek and Zhipu exploring custom silicon

Raised $7B in first major funding round, abandoning no-funding pledge

Plans to launch Harness AI coding agent team to compete with Claude Code

A new, unidentified ~100B parameter model appeared on the OpenRouter API platform, sparking speculation about its origin.

Platform hosts models from major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta.

Weekly token consumption on OpenRouter shifted from U.S. to Chinese models