China’s Tencent leases 100,000 chips from US’ Oracle amid escalating AI race: Report

Chinese tech giant Tencent has signed a $7 billion lease deal with US cloud provider Oracle that has enabled the company to access around 100,000 advanced AI chips, which were not available in China, Financial Times reported on Thursday.

The world-leading internet and technology company this year agreed to a five-year lease across multiple Oracle data centers in south-east Asia amid an escalating AI race.

Neither Tencent nor Oracle have publicly revealed the reported deal.

Tencent’s largest overseas deal empowered the company to access around 100,000 advanced AI chips, which were not available in China.

The agreement includes an upfront payment of about 30%.

The settlement follows a shortage of domestic supply and tightening American export controls that have led Chinese tech groups to seek more computing capacity overseas.

While Tencent is keeping pace with multibillion dollar leasing deals, ByteDance and Alibaba remain the biggest clients of data centers in south-east Asia.

The tech group has increased its infrastructure spending over the past year as the company is also implementing AI agents in its ecosystem, particularly its WeChat superapp, which has more than 1.4 billion users.