Sept 30 (Reuters) – Tencent signed its largest overseas lease deal with US cloud provider Oracle to access about 100,000 advanced AI chips that were not available in China, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Chinese technology giant this year agreed to a five-year lease across multiple Oracle data centers in south-east Asia, according to the report.
The deal is estimated to be worth about $7 billion, with an upfront payment of about 30%, the report said.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Oracle and Tencent did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the report.
The deal highlights the surging computing needs of Tencent’s AI expansion, as the company ramps up investment in developing and deploying large language models.
Tencent recently released a preview version of its new AI image-generation model for professional creators, offering text-to-image and image-to-image capabilities, among other features.
Chinese firms have been racing to secure AI chips as US export curbs tighten and Beijing promotes home-grown alternatives to US technology providers.
(Reporting by Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)
