Tencent has signed its largest overseas lease deal with US cloud provider Oracle to access about 100,000 advanced AI chips unavailable in China. The five-year agreement, estimated at $7bn, spans multiple Oracle data centres in south-east Asia and supports Tencent’s AI model training and agentic tool development. The deal contributed to a negative free cash flow of Rmb13.8bn ($2bn) in Q2 2026, the first in over a decade.
Tightening US export controls have pushed Chinese tech firms to lease computing capacity abroad, with Byte Dance and Alibaba also major clients in the region. Tencent’s infrastructure spending jumped 176 per cent year on year to Rmb53bn ($7.9bn) for AI infrastructure and pre-payments. The company is integrating AI agents into WeChat, its superapp with over 1.4bn users, launching Xiaowei for task execution and Work Buddy for enterprise productivity.
Tencent’s Hunyuan models now rival Alibaba’s Qwen. Tencent and Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing