DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported.

The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since kept reasonable pace with the top models in the world in areas like reasoning and coding while remaining open weight (versions are freely available on Hugging Face).

Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, the lab has not previously sought out investors, the FT reports. However, faced with competitors poaching DeepSeek’s researchers, Liang opted to raise funds in order to offer employees shares in the company, sources tell the FT.

The round is said to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China is seeking to fund homegrown AI technology to sidestep the difficulty of obtaining U.S. technology, particularly chips. DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips made by China’s hardware giant Huawei Technologies. That combo is considered a powerful duo for the nation to develop its own AI to rival the United States. The country’s cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly in talks to participate, per Bloomberg.

DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company that also houses his AI company, xAI, is considering spending $55 billion, at least initially, to build a semiconductor factory in Grimes County, Texas, according to a proposal on the county website.

The company estimates it may spend a total of $119 billion on the project, which would be a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility,” according to the filing.

Musk has previously outlined plans for the project, dubbed “Terafab,” that will also see Tesla contributing resources. The companies have roped chipmaking giant Intel into the effort, aiming to develop chips for AI servers, satellites, SpaceX’s proposed data center in space, as well as autonomous Tesla vehicles and robots.

The billionaire has said the manufacturing facility will, sometime in the future, manufacture enough chips to provide 1 terawatt of power per year, arguing that semiconductor manufacturers aren’t making chips quickly enough for his companies’ artificial intelligence and robotics needs. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab,” he wrote.

However, Musk wrote in a tweet on Tuesday that Grimes County, Texas, was only one of several locations under consideration for the factory.

The filing comes as Musk has doubled down on ensuring xAI has enough computing power available to train and power its Grok series of AI models. He’s also intent on capitalizing on the demand for AI compute by building data centers in space, which he has cited as a big reason for combining xAI with SpaceX. The combined entity is said to have a valuation of $1.25 trillion and is expected to go public in June.

AI evaluation startup Braintrust has urged customers to revoke and replace their API keys after an earlier breach of customer secrets.

According to an email sent to customers Monday and seen by TechCrunch, the startup confirmed “unauthorized access” in one of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud accounts, which contained API keys used by customers for accessing cloud-based AI models.

“We’ve communicated with one impacted customer and to date have not found evidence of broader exposure,” read the email.

The email asked “every customer to rotate” any of the API keys that they store with Braintrust.

Braintrust disclosed the security incident on its website on Tuesday. “The incident has been contained, and in the meantime, we’ve locked down the compromised account, audited and restricted access across related systems, and rotated internal secrets.” 

The company said the cause of the breach is under investigation.

Braintrust spokesperson Martin Bergman told TechCrunch that the company sent the email to customers “out of an abundance of caution” and that it “confirmed a security incident, but there is no evidence of a breach at this time.”

Braintrust provides a platform designed for companies to monitor AI models and products. Founder and CEO Ankur Goyal previously told TechCrunch that Braintrust is like an “operating system for engineers building AI software.” The startup raised $80 million in a Series B funding round in February, which valued the company at $800 million.

Jaime Blasco, the co-founder of cybersecurity startup Nudge Security who received a breach email alert from Braintrust, told TechCrunch that the incident could have “downstream implications for affected customers,” like AI companies that rely on Braintrust.

Hackers frequently target corporate accounts on cloud services or third-party platforms as an effective way of stealing secrets, like API keys. Once hackers get their hands on API keys, they can log into the company or customers’ systems appearing as if they are legitimate users, without needing to break into the target company’s systems. 

CircleCI, a company that provides development products for software engineers, was hit with a similar cloud data breach in 2023, and similarly asked its customers to rotate “any and all secrets” they stored with the company.

More recently, an EU cybersecurity agency said hackers were able to steal 92 gigabytes of data from a compromised AWS account used by the European Commission. The breach affected 29 other EU entities and the data of dozens of internal European Commission clients.