Tencent reportedly leases 100,000 AI chips to Oracle in Southeast Asia for about $7 billion

This five-year contract, paid 30% in advance according to the Financial Times, would allow the Chinese group to access GPUs outside China that American controls prohibit it from buying.

Tencent would have signed the largest computing capacity lease in his history abroad. According to the Financial Times, taken over by Reuters, the Chinese giant would access about 100,000 advanced AI chips hosted in several Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. The agreement would cover five years for some $7 billion, of which approximately 30% would be paid from the outset. Neither company confirmed this.

Contour without breaking

The US rules prohibit Chinese groups from buying the most advanced Nvidia GPUs directly, but to date not from leasing computing capacity outside China. ByteDance has already taken the same route: its Singaporean subsidiary Spring uses 2,304 GPU B200 in a data center in Nscale, Norway.

The contract illustrates Tencent's appetite for the calculation: its second quarter investments jumped by 176 percent year-on-year to 52.8 billion yuan, and its free cash flow rose in red (-13.8 billion yuan) due to AI prepayments. The group seeks to catch DeepSeek and Alibaba with its Hunyuan models, which it includes in WeChat.