Some US companies are adopting China's DeepSeek AI models as expenses for Silicon Valley tools increase. The trend appears on corporate spending data from Ramp, though adoption remains limited compared with OpenAI and Anthropic.
DeepSeek ranked first on Ramp’s June list of trending software vendors. Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab, noted that firms are sending payments directly to the Chinese startup and routing data to its hosted servers. Adoption of DeepSeek reached 0.1 percent by April 2026 after a brief rise to 0.3 percent in January 2025. OpenAI and Anthropic held shares of 32.3 percent and 34.4 percent in the same period. DeepSeek is also reported to be raising 7.4 billion dollars in its first external funding round at a valuation between 52 billion and 59 billion dollars, with investors including Tencent and CATL.
