CATL deepens AI bets, joins DeepSeek's reported new funding round
A Huxiu repost of a Baobian article, citing Bloomberg, reports that DeepSeek's new funding round is close to completion at roughly RMB 80–100 billion, with Tencent and CATL again among the biggest investors — about four months after CATL first appeared on DeepSeek's shareholder list. The piece argues CATL is copying its battery-era "shovel seller" playbook in AI, backing embodied-AI companies such as Galbot and several humanoid-robot startups, plus computing-infrastructure and energy-AI firms including VNET, and committing RMB 1.62 billion to two funds aimed explicitly at AI and embodied intelligence. CATL founder Robin Zeng says the expansion stays around the company's core capabilities and that CATL does not intend to compete with AI firms but to contribute energy solutions for AI data centers; JPMorgan is cited as seeing it becoming a strategic energy-infrastructure partner for AI compute. The article also notes humanoid robots have entered a CATL PACK final-inspection line and industrial robots work routinely in its battery plants, and cites International Energy Agency estimates that global data-center electricity use will nearly double to about 945 billion kWh by 2030.
It shows energy and compute becoming intertwined, as a battery giant courts AI data centers and robots as its next customers.