Tencent Holdings LtdTencent leases ~100,000 advanced AI chips to accelerate its AI development and sharpen its competitive edge, with its Hunyuan model narrowing the gap to DeepSeek and Alibaba.
Tencent, China's internet giant, has signed a five-year agreement to lease about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle for $7 billion, in a push to accelerate its AI development and sharpen its competitive edge. The Financial Times reported on October 1, citing two sources, that Tencent will lease the chips from several Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. The deal is Tencent's largest overseas leasing contract and gives the company access to roughly 100,000 advanced chips that are not sold in China. Tencent must pay about 30% of the deal's value upfront, and the lease costs weighed on Tencent's free cash flow in its second-quarter results. Under U.S. regulations, Chinese technology companies cannot buy advanced AI chips directly, but they can still lease such chips from abroad, giving them access to advanced Nvidia chips that are generally unavailable in China. Meanwhile, Tencent's latest Hunyuan model has improved markedly in recent months and is seen as narrowing the gap with leading Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Alibaba Group Holding.
Tencent Holdings LtdTencent leases ~100,000 advanced AI chips to accelerate its AI development and sharpen its competitive edge, with its Hunyuan model narrowing the gap to DeepSeek and Alibaba.
Oracle CorporationOracle signs a five-year, $7 billion deal to lease ~100,000 AI chips to Tencent from its Southeast Asia data centers, a major customer win for its cloud/AI capacity.
NVIDIA CorporationTencent's $7B lease of ~100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle data centers gives it access to Nvidia chips unavailable in China, boosting demand for Nvidia's AI hardware.