The takeaway: A quiet Monday for the Western labs, and China's two biggest AI startups filled the space. DeepSeek is lining up a fresh raise at a valuation of about $74 billion and has started work toward a listing on Shanghai's STAR Market. Moonshot had the opposite problem — its days-old Kimi K3 model proved so popular it has had to stop taking new subscribers while it finds more GPUs, and it is now said to be weighing a public listing of its own. Shanghai's big AI summit wraps up today, and there's a small note on the plumbing underneath Claude Code. Here's Monday's catch-up.

DeepSeek lines up a $74bn round — and an IPO on home turf

DeepSeek is preparing a new funding round at a valuation of about 500 billion yuan — roughly $74 billion — and is aiming to raise as much as 50 billion yuan, according to a Reuters report on 20 July. The Hangzhou company has also begun early deliberations on an initial public offering on Shanghai's Nasdaq-style STAR Market, with an internal target to complete a filing before the end of the year. Reuters cautions the plans are at an early stage and the terms and timetable may change.

The number is what stands out. This comes only weeks after DeepSeek's roughly $7.4 billion June round — its first big outside raise — and the valuation has climbed sharply since. A STAR Market listing would keep DeepSeek firmly onshore, funded in yuan by domestic backers (June's round drew Tencent, CATL and China's national AI fund), at a time when US public markets are effectively closed to leading Chinese AI firms. For a company that rattled the industry last year by matching Western models at a fraction of the cost, raising at this level — and heading for a home-market IPO — is a statement about how much runway China's frontier labs believe they have.

Sources: Reuters via Investing.com, The Manila Times.

Moonshot has to turn people away from Kimi

The mirror image played out at Moonshot. Its new flagship, Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model launched on 16 July — drew so much demand that within 48 hours it pushed close to the limits of the company's GPU capacity. On 19 July Moonshot said it was temporarily pausing new subscriptions to protect the experience of existing users, and split its plans into two tiers: one covering Kimi's web, app and work products, and a separate membership for its Kimi Code programming tools. New sign-ups will be let back in "in controlled batches" as it adds compute.

Turning away paying customers is an awkward kind of success, but it is success — and the timing is notable: Moonshot is now reported to be eyeing an IPO on the back of K3's reception. The open weights are still due to be released publicly on 27 July, which will let organisations run the model on their own hardware and skip the subscription queue entirely, so the bottleneck may prove short-lived. Between DeepSeek's raise and Moonshot's overflow, the through-line of the week is the same: Chinese demand for home-grown frontier models is running ahead of the compute to serve it.

Sources: Pandaily, CNBC, Digitimes.

Shanghai's AI summit wraps

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai wraps up today, 20 July, capping the event where Xi Jinping used his keynote to position China as a champion of open-source AI and Global-South governance, and where a new 29-nation World AI Cooperation Organisation was established with its headquarters in Shanghai. We covered the speech and the founding documents last week; what the summit leaves behind is an institutional counterweight — a China-anchored governance bloc — to the US- and Europe-led forums.

Sources: Al Jazeera.

Also worth a note

One from under the bonnet: developer Simon Willison documented on 19 July that Anthropic's Claude Code has, since version 2.1.181 in mid-June, been running on the Rust port of Bun — the JavaScript runtime's ground-up rewrite in Rust. It's an implementation detail rather than a headline, but a telling one about how much the tooling beneath today's AI coding agents is being re-engineered for speed.

Sources: Simon Willison.