Two developments in early June showed how differently capital and adoption are moving through AI right now. DeepSeek, the Chinese lab that had never taken outside money, moved to raise $7.4 billion from Tencent, CATL and a group of state-backed funds. In the same week, Snowflake and Anthropic disclosed that enterprise customers running Claude inside Snowflake's Cortex AI platform had grown into the thousands. One story is about a research lab finally needing outside capital to keep training. The other is about buyers who have already decided and are now scaling what they bought.
DeepSeek raises its first outside round
Reuters reported on June 3 that DeepSeek was seeking roughly 50 billion yuan, about $7.4 billion, in its first external funding round, with the raise expected to value the company between 350 billion yuan and 400 billion yuan, or $52 billion to $59 billion. Tencent was reportedly set to contribute 10 billion yuan and battery maker CATL 5 billion yuan, with founder Liang Wenfeng putting in 20 billion yuan of his own money to retain control. NetEase, JD.com, IDG Capital and China's state-backed AI investment funds were also named as prospective participants.
The significance is less the price tag than the precedent. DeepSeek had operated entirely off the balance sheet of High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund Liang also founded, since its first models shipped. That arrangement worked while DeepSeek was a research offshoot with modest compute needs. It stopped working once training runs began requiring more chips, more data center capacity and more power than a single hedge fund could keep financing on its own, according to reporting on the round. The 50 billion yuan sought amounts to more than 60% of High-Flyer's total assets, a scale mismatch that explains why Liang went looking for outside capital for the first time.
For buyers evaluating open-weight Chinese models against US and European alternatives, the raise answers a question that had lingered since DeepSeek's 2025 breakout: whether the lab could keep shipping frontier-scale models without conventional venture backing. The answer, as of this round, is no. That has implications for anyone building a roadmap around DeepSeek's release cadence. A lab now answerable to Tencent, CATL and state funds is not the same independent actor it was a year ago.
Snowflake and Anthropic report enterprise adoption is compounding
On June 1, Snowflake and Anthropic announced that enterprise use of Claude inside Snowflake's Cortex AI had accelerated, with Snowflake Cortex Code, one of the integration points, becoming the company's fastest-growing product at more than 7,100 enterprise users. Named customers running the combined stack in production include Basis, Block, Carvana, Deloitte, eSentire, Indeed and Notion, spanning use cases from cybersecurity investigations to financial analysis and developer productivity.
The announcement builds on a partnership the two companies expanded in December 2025, which put Claude models inside Cortex AI across major cloud platforms and set up a joint go-to-market motion. Snowflake is also one of six launch partners in Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, which lets enterprises apply existing Anthropic spending commitments toward Snowflake's AI services rather than negotiating a separate contract.
The practical effect for enterprise buyers already inside Snowflake's data platform is a shorter path from pilot to production: procurement, governance and billing run through infrastructure many of them already have in place, rather than a standalone AI vendor relationship. That is a distinct kind of adoption story from a new model launch. It is proof that a specific packaging choice, bundling a foundation model inside an existing data platform's commercial terms, is what is actually moving enterprise budgets this quarter.
What to watch next
DeepSeek's round was still being finalized as of mid-June, with Reuters noting terms could still change before close. Whether the raise closes at the reported valuation, and whether it comes with governance conditions from its state-linked backers, will shape how Western enterprises weight DeepSeek's open-weight releases going forward. On the Snowflake and Anthropic side, the next signal to watch is whether other cloud data platforms, Databricks in particular, respond with a comparable bundled-procurement deal of their own before Snowflake's Cortex Marketplace model becomes the default expectation among enterprise AI buyers.
Sources: Reuters via Investing.com, "DeepSeek set for $7 bln fundraise with Tencent, CATL in the lead" · Sahm Capital, "DeepSeek Eyes $7.4 Billion Funding Round At Up To $59 Billion Valuation" · Digital Applied, "DeepSeek's First Raise: ~$7.4B and Open-Weight Stakes" · Snowflake Newsroom, "Snowflake and Anthropic Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption Driven by Rising Demand for Governed AI" · Businesswire, "Snowflake and Anthropic Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption"