While DeepSeek dominated global headlines in 2025 with its hyper-efficient R1 and V3 AI models, its parent organization was quietly staging a massive financial comeback. High-Flyer Quantitative Investment, the $8 billion Chinese hedge fund founded by DeepSeek creator Liang Wenfeng, reported a staggering 56.6% average return across its funds for the 2025 calendar year.
This surge positions High-Flyer as one of the top-performing quant funds in Asia, proving that the same architectural innovations powering DeepSeek’s AI are providing a “generational alpha” in the financial markets.
The Synergy: How AI Tech Fueled Financial Returns
The secret to the fund’s 57% surge lies in the “virtuous cycle” between Liang Wenfeng’s two ventures. Unlike Western AI labs that rely on venture capital, DeepSeek is 100% self-funded by the profits of High-Flyer.
1. From LLMs to Stock Predictions
High-Flyer utilized the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture—the same tech that made DeepSeek-V3 so cost-efficient—to overhaul its trading algorithms. By activating only specialized “expert” sub-networks for specific market conditions, the fund:
- Reduced Latency: Executed trades faster than traditional transformer-based models.
- Improved Accuracy: Better predicted “black swan” volatility during the mid-2025 market fluctuations.
2. The “Fire-Flyer” Advantage
DeepSeek’s proprietary supercomputing clusters (Fire-Flyer 2) were dual-purposed. While they trained the R1 reasoning model at night, they processed massive datasets for High-Flyer’s quantitative strategies during peak trading hours, maximizing the ROI on their limited NVIDIA H800 hardware.
2025 Performance Breakdown
High-Flyer’s performance is a sharp reversal from 2024, when the firm trailed the CSI 300 index following a regulatory crackdown on quant trading in China.
| Fund Metric | 2024 Performance | 2025 Performance |
| Average Return | -4% (vs Index) | +56.6% |
| Assets Under Management | $7 Billion | $8.2 Billion (est.) |
| Ranking | Top 20 (China) | #2 (China Quant Category) |
Liang Wenfeng: The New AI-Quant Billionaire
The 57% surge in fund performance, combined with the “blue-sky” valuation of DeepSeek, has propelled Liang Wenfeng into the ranks of the world’s most influential tech figures.
- Net Worth: In early 2026, Forbes estimated Liang’s fortune at approximately $4.5 billion, largely due to his 84% stake in DeepSeek and his majority ownership of High-Flyer.
- Strategic Autonomy: By remaining self-funded through High-Flyer, Liang has avoided the “VC trap,” allowing DeepSeek to release its weights under the MIT License without pressure for immediate monetization.
The Future: DeepSeek V4 and High-Flyer’s Next Move
As we move into 2026, High-Flyer is reportedly reinvesting nearly ₹2,500 crore ($300 million) of its 2025 profits into a new GPU cluster. This infrastructure will support the upcoming DeepSeek-V4, which is rumored to feature “Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections” to further reduce training costs.
For the global finance industry, High-Flyer’s success serves as a case study: the future of hedge funds may not lie in better financial theory, but in more efficient AI architecture.
