Tencent strikes its biggest overseas computing deal with Oracle as it chases AI rivals
Article excerpt
A roughly $7bn, five-year lease gives the Chinese internet giant access to about 100,000 advanced chips in south-east Asia, pushing its quarterly free cash flow negative for the first time in more than a decade. Tencent, China's leading social media and gaming company, has signed the largest overseas computing lease in its history, renting capacity from US cloud provider Oracle as it works to close the gap with rivals in artificial intelligence. Two people familiar with the matter said the five-year agreement, reached this year, covers several Oracle data centres across south-east Asia. The arrangement gives Tencent use of roughly 100,000 sophisticated AI chips that it cannot obtain inside China. It is using them to refine its models and build autonomous software agents. One of the sources put the deal's value at around $7bn, with about 30 per cent payable up front. That large prepayment helped push Tencent's free cash flow to negative Rmb13.8bn ($2bn) in the second quarter, its first quarterly deficit in over ten years. Capital expenditure for the period climbed 176 per cent from a year earlier to Rmb53bn ($7.9bn), which the company attributed to AI infrastructure and advance payments for computing resources. Scramble for offshore capacity Chinese technology groups are increasingly looking abroad for computing power because of limited domestic supply and tighter US export...
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With stronger models in hand, the company is rolling out Xiaowei, an agent built into WeChat, its superapp with more than 1.4bn users.
