Tencent has signed a roughly $7 billion five-year lease with Oracle for about 100,000 advanced artificial intelligence chips hosted across multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported, according to Reuters. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report, and Oracle and Tencent did not respond to requests for comment.
Per the FT account relayed by Reuters, the arrangement would be Tencent’s largest overseas computing lease and would give the Chinese internet giant access to advanced AI chips that are unavailable inside China under U.S. export controls. About 30 percent of the lease value would be paid upfront, the FT reported, with capacity spread across several Oracle facilities in the region rather than a single site.
The unverified report lands amid a broader race for AI compute as Chinese firms seek offshore capacity while Washington restricts advanced semiconductor exports to China. Routing training and inference workloads through U.S.-linked cloud regions in Southeast Asia would, if confirmed, illustrate how export curbs reshape where Chinese AI demand can still find silicon.
AITD is treating the story as an attributed FT report only until Oracle, Tencent, or a primary filing confirms the terms. Secondary outlets repeating the FT account likewise frame the lease as unconfirmed.