Chinese technology giant Tencent has reportedly signed a five-year agreement with Oracle to access around 100,000 advanced artificial intelligence chips through the US company's data centres in Southeast Asia, as demand for computing capacity continues to rise among major AI developers.
The agreement is estimated to be worth about $7 billion, with roughly 30% of the amount to be paid upfront, according to reports citing people familiar with the matter. It is described as Tencent's largest overseas leasing agreement with a US cloud provider.
Under the reported arrangement, Tencent would use computing capacity powered by advanced AI chips hosted across multiple Oracle data centres in Southeast Asia. The processors covered by the agreement are not available for direct purchase in China, making overseas cloud infrastructure another route for Chinese technology companies seeking additional computing resources.
Neither Oracle nor Tencent had publicly confirmed the reported agreement at the time of publication. Reuters also said it was unable to independently verify the Financial Times report.
The deal comes as Tencent increases investment in the infrastructure required to develop and deploy artificial intelligence products. The company has been working on its Hunyuan family of AI models while expanding the use of AI across its wider product ecosystem.
Tencent has also been developing generative AI capabilities beyond text. The company recently released a preview of an AI image-generation model aimed at professional creators, supporting capabilities including text-to-image and image-to-image generation.
Access to computing infrastructure has become an important consideration for Chinese AI companies amid US restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors to China. At the same time, Beijing has been encouraging the development and adoption of domestically produced alternatives to US technology.
For Oracle, the reported agreement would add another large AI workload to its cloud infrastructure business. The company has been expanding its AI computing capacity and previously announced plans to offer an AI supercluster powered by 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs, with deployment beginning in the third quarter of 2026.
If completed on the reported terms, the Tencent agreement would underline the scale of computing resources being committed to AI development and the growing role of cloud providers in supplying access to advanced chips without customers directly owning the underlying hardware.
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