According to a Financial Times report cited by Tom's Hardware, Tencent has signed a five-year lease for roughly 100,000 advanced AI chips at Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, with a total value around $7 billion. The arrangement would include about 30 percent paid upfront. Neither company has commented, and the report does not specify which chips are involved, though the pricing suggests Hopper-class hardware such as the H100 or H200.
At an estimated $1.60 per chip-hour, the deal undercuts typical one-year H100 contracts, which SemiAnalysis put at about $2.80 per GPU-hour in August, and is also below the $3.09 per GPU-hour for a three-year B200 contract cited in a 2025 Datasection filing. That discount runs counter to the broader trend of rising compute rental prices. Tencent president Martin Lau said on an earnings call that the company could sell its existing orders at a profit of more than 30 percent over what it paid a few months ago.
The legal status is uncertain. The report says current U.S. rules allow such leases, but the Remote Access Security Act, which passed the House, would give the government authority to regulate remote cloud access to sensitive technology. The Department of Commerce is also reported to be drafting a rule to block Chinese firms from renting compute in third countries. Oracle has not named Tencent as a customer in its financial disclosures, but the company has reported large prepayments and rising deferred revenue, consistent with the deal's upfront structure.