AIBRIEF
API calls ran an 82.9% gross margin. A $7B round this year and a 2027 STAR Market listing try to outrun $1.5B in AI infrastructure spend.
DeepSeek booked roughly 475 million yuan (about $67 million at recent exchange rates) in revenue across the first seven months of 2026, close to ten times its full-year 2025 total, while posting a 715 million yuan (about $101 million) net loss. IT之家, DigitalToday Korea, and Sina Finance have carried the figures; they are not audited and have circulated as leaks reported via foreign media.
The shape of the unit economics is what makes them worth holding. API calls carried an 82.9% gross margin, against a blended 44.6% margin once the infrastructure bill is netted out, per DigitalToday Korea. That blended margin is doing the work of an estimated 11 billion yuan (about $1.55 billion at recent rates) in AI infrastructure spend across the same seven months, against roughly 1.2 billion yuan (about $170 million) for the same stretch a year earlier.
The company is now raising the capital to match. It is closing a roughly 50 billion yuan (about $7 billion) round at a 500 billion yuan (around $70 billion) pre-money target, per Guancha and Silicon Republic, and has hired banks for a STAR Market IPO filing aimed at year-end 2026 with a 2027 listing, per the Straits Times. The bet is that API margin scales faster than the infra bill. The public filings, when they land, will be the first audit-grade view of whether it does.