Inside DeepSeek AI: The Chinese Foundation Model Powerhouse Revolutionizing Open-Source AI in 2025
DeepSeek AI was founded in 2023 as a spin-off from Hangzhou‑based High-Flyer Capital Management, following a March 2023 announcement that the fund would devote resources to AGI research. High-Flyer built two private AI clusters before export restrictions—1,100 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in 2020 and about 10,000 A100 GPUs in 2021, at a cost of ¥1 billion, with a 10,000‑GPU cluster online by 2022. In May 2024, DeepSeek‑V2 was released as a 236‑billion‑parameter Mixture-of-Experts model that ranked top three on AlignBench and was described as rivaling GPT‑4‑Turbo at low cost. Liang Wenfeng, born in 1985, is DeepSeek’s founder and CEO, owning about