Tencent, the owner of WeChat, has agreed to rent access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Oracle’s Southeast Asian data centres, the Financial Times reports. The arrangement gives it access to hardware unavailable in China as it competes with other Chinese AI developers.
According to Reuters’ account of the FT reporting, the deal was signed this year, runs for five years and is worth an estimated $7 billion, with about 30% paid upfront. It would be Tencent’s largest overseas lease agreement.
The important distinction is where the computing happens: Tencent is renting capacity abroad, not bringing those chips into China. The reported deal illustrates how overseas cloud services can supply computing power that Chinese developers cannot obtain at home.
The terms remain unconfirmed by the companies. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the FT report and that neither Oracle nor Tencent immediately responded to its requests for comment.
