Tencent signs agreement with Oracle to lease 100,000 chips to accelerate AI layout

Tencent signed its largest overseas leasing agreement with US cloud service provider Oracle, reaching a five-year leasing arrangement this year covering multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, thereby obtaining about 100,000 advanced AI chips that cannot be obtained in China, to advance its AI model and agent tool development. Two people familiar with the matter said the agreement is valued at about 7 billion US dollars, with a down payment of about 30%, and caused Tencent's second-quarter free cash flow to be negative 13.8 billion yuan (about 2 billion US dollars), the first quarterly negative value in more than a decade. Tightening US export controls and domestic supply shortages have prompted Chinese tech companies to turn to overseas computing power; such leasing agreements are permitted under US rules and may also allow companies to use cutting-edge Nvidia processors that cannot be obtained in China. Tencent's second-quarter capital expenditure increased 176% year-on-year to 53 billion yuan (about 7.9 billion US dollars), for AI infrastructure and prepayments for computing resources; the company also launched the embedded agent Xiaowei in WeChat and built an enterprise-level AI agent matrix led by WorkBuddy.