Chinese technology and gaming conglomerate Tencent has signed its largest-ever overseas lease agreement with US cloud provider Oracle, securing access to approximately 100,000 advanced AI chips that are currently barred from direct sale to China, according to a Wednesday report by the Financial Times.
Estimated at around $7 billion over a five-year period—with Tencent paying roughly 30% upfront—the agreement places the massive computing cluster across multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. Neither Oracle nor Tencent immediately responded to requests for comment, and Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
“Valued at an estimated $7 billion over five years, the agreement marks Tencent’s largest-ever overseas cloud lease, complete with a 30% upfront payment.”
The deal underscores the costly workarounds Chinese tech giants are using to navigate tightening Washington export controls. While US regulations strictly prohibit semiconductor leaders like Nvidia from shipping top-tier AI processors directly to mainland China, leasing computing power remotely through overseas cloud infrastructure remains a viable pathway. Southeast Asian hubs—particularly Malaysia and Singapore—have seen a massive influx of data center investment to serve this exact cross-border demand.
Securing this computational brute force is vital for Tencent as it ramps up investment in developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). The company recently released a preview version of its new AI image-generation model tailored for professional creators, offering advanced text-to-image and image-to-image capabilities alongside other generative features.
“While US export curbs block physical chip shipments to China, leasing remote computing power in Southeast Asian data centers offers a critical lifeline for Chinese AI giants.”
Beyond standalone creative tools, the 100,000-chip cluster will accelerate the training of Tencent’s proprietary ‘Hunyuan’ foundation model family. This infrastructure directly supports AI integration across Tencent’s massive consumer and enterprise ecosystem, including its WeChat super-app—which serves over 1.3 billion users—as well as its global gaming portfolio and digital advertising network.
Across China, domestic rivals like Alibaba and Baidu are locked in a parallel high-stakes race to secure advanced silicon as US trade barriers tighten. Although Beijing is aggressively promoting home-grown semiconductor alternatives to replace US technology providers, offshore cloud clusters powered by American-designed chips remain essential for Chinese firms looking to train frontier AI models at scale.
“Although Beijing is aggressively pushing home-grown semiconductor alternatives, offshore cloud clusters remain essential for Chinese firms training frontier AI models at scale.”