DeepSeek was only founded in 2023. The company is based in Hangzhou, an important port city in Eastern China that has been a strategic hub along the Silk Roads for thousands of years. DeepSeek has been building large language models (LLMs) since the company was created, but the[ 2025 release of their R1 LLM challenged](https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/









