Tencent has agreed to lease approximately 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle across several data centers in Southeast Asia under a five-year arrangement estimated to be worth about $7 billion, with roughly 30 percent paid upfront, the Financial Times reported on October 1. Neither Tencent nor Oracle has commented publicly, and neither has disclosed the chip model or the host countries.
The chips never enter China: under US export rules, Chinese firms are barred from direct purchase of the advanced processors but permitted to lease compute capacity in overseas data centers. Tom’s Hardware calculated the reported contract value at about $1.60 per chip-hour over five years, roughly 43 percent below the $2.80 per GPU-hour SemiAnalysis estimated for Nvidia H100 capacity on one-year contracts, though the comparison is not exact given the undisclosed hardware and contract terms.
The deal is described as Tencent’s largest-ever overseas lease agreement and is already visible in its accounts, weighing on second-quarter free cash flow. Tencent’s capex jumped 176 percent year on year in Q2 to 53 billion yuan ($7.5 billion) on AI compute and data-center spending. For Oracle, the lease stacks another large multi-year pre-commitment onto an infrastructure book under investor scrutiny after a difficult year: shares are down more than 50 percent from their September 2025 highs, negative free cash flow reached $5.4 billion last quarter, and the company plans $90-95 billion of capex this year.