DeepSeek paid 140.8 million yuan for 933,399 shares in a robot maker in its own city of Hangzhou. By Wednesday's close those shares were worth 789 million yuan, and DeepSeek cannot sell one of them until 2029.
Unitree Robotics, formally Yushu Technology, listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on Wednesday at 150.80 yuan and closed at 845, up 460 percent, worth 342 billion yuan — roughly $50 billion, by Reuters' reckoning.
The offering was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a record for the exchange, and a regulatory filing put an ordinary investor's odds of receiving a share at 0.018 percent. So the number to look at is not 460. It is 933,399. Almost nobody who wanted this stock got any, and DeepSeek was handed a block at the offering price, locked for thirty-six months. Nine strategic investors were allotted 8.08 million shares between them, a fifth of everything sold.
What DeepSeek bought was not really the block. According to the stock-exchange filing reported by Reuters, the two companies agreed to develop AI models for humanoid machines together and to prefer each other commercially — Unitree goes to DeepSeek first for model training and technical solutions, DeepSeek goes to Unitree first when it buys robots or works on embodied AI. A language model runs out of internet. Reuters, reporting the filing, noted what the arrangement could hand DeepSeek instead: robots, and the physical-world data that comes with them.
There is a duller reading, and it is a fair one. DeepSeek came out of High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund Liang Wenfeng co-founded before he founded DeepSeek, so an allocation in the most oversubscribed listing in the exchange's history is not out of character, and it was worth 5.6 times its cost by the closing bell.
The sum is small either way: 2.31 percent of the shares sold, under a quarter of one percent of the company, about $20.8 million against the $7 billion Bloomberg reported DeepSeek raised in June. What does not fit the trading explanation is the three years and the supply agreement. Funds sign neither.
The rest of the strategic list is where this stops being about AI. China National Petroleum took 2.23 percent of the offering. So did China Southern Power Grid. So did China Telecom. Oil, electricity, telephones — which looks less like a group of admirers than a list of the places a robot might eventually be put to work.
Wednesday's price was the number everyone watched, and it is the one thing here DeepSeek cannot use. What it can use is a robot maker that has agreed to call it first.
A language model runs out of internet.
