DeepSeek Closes $7.5B Funding Round, Annualized Revenue Hits $1B

The scale here is the story: a $7.5 billion raise paired with a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate puts a Chinese model developer in the same capital and commercialization conversation as the largest Western labs, at a time when compute access and export controls remain the sector's central constraint. The revenue figure also matters more than the raise, since it suggests enterprise demand for model access is monetizing faster than the cost of serving it is falling. Whether that run rate is concentrated in a few large customers, and how the capital is deployed against compute, are the open questions.