Tencent Leases 100,000 Oracle AI Chips in $7 Billion Deal to Power 5-Year AI Push
Updated
Updated · Financial Times · Oct 1
Tencent Leases 100,000 Oracle AI Chips in $7 Billion Deal to Power 5-Year AI Push
3 articles · Updated · Financial Times · Oct 1
Summary
$7 billion is the estimated value of Tencent’s five-year lease with Oracle, giving the Chinese group access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips in data centres across south-east Asia.
The overseas deal helps Tencent bypass a shortage of high-end chips in China, where tighter US export controls have pushed tech groups to rent computing capacity abroad instead of buying restricted hardware directly.
30% was paid upfront, and Tencent said prepayments for computing resources helped drive second-quarter capital expenditure up 176% year on year to Rmb53 billion, while free cash flow turned negative Rmb13.8 billion.
Tencent is using the added capacity to train stronger Hunyuan models and expand AI agents including Xiaowei in WeChat—used by more than 1.4 billion people—and WorkBuddy for enterprise users.
The lease underscores how Chinese AI groups are increasingly competing for south-east Asian data-centre capacity, where ByteDance and Alibaba are still larger customers and stricter US rules have lifted prices and contract terms.