❯ Tencent reportedly signs a roughly $7 billion deal with Oracle to rent about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Southeast Asia

$7 billion over five yearsAccording to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, Tencent signed a roughly $7 billion, five-year lease with Oracle this year to access about 100,000 advanced AI chips unavailable in China through Southeast Asian data centers. Neither company has publicly confirmed it.

A workaround under export controlsUS export controls bar Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China, but do not stop Chinese companies from renting compute deployed overseas. Oracle previously announced a $6.5 billion investment in a Malaysian cloud region. Tencent was also earlier reported to have rented Nvidia Blackwell chips through a Japanese company.

A regulatory gap in the spotlightThis gives Tencent a practical way to keep training and running large models while domestic chip supply falls short. The same day, US authorities arrested a California man suspected of smuggling more than $300 million of Nvidia chips to China. Overseas leasing, the legal route, may be Washington’s next target, and cloud providers like Oracle will face more scrutiny.

▪ SIGNALExport controls can track where chips go but struggle to control who uses the compute, making leasing the biggest gray zone in the rules.