Oracle reportedly lands $7 billion AI chip lease with Tencent

Oracle has reportedly agreed to a five-year lease with Tencent valued at approximately $7 billion. Under the reported deal, Tencent would tap into around 100,000 advanced AI chips housed in Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. If it holds up, this would be Tencent’s largest overseas bet on AI infrastructure so far. It also shows a Chinese tech giant routing around US export controls by renting compute it cannot easily buy at home. Neither company has confirmed the arrangement. What the reported deal looks like The Financial Times first reported the agreement on September 30, 2026. Reuters followed with its own report on October 1. The lease runs five years, carries a value of roughly $7 billion, and about 30% of the total is said to be paid upfront. The chips themselves would stay put in Southeast Asia. Tencent would not own them. It would rent their computing power, the way a startup rents servers from a cloud provider instead of building its own data center. Why Tencent is shopping abroad US export rules restrict China’s access to the kind of high-end AI chips covered by this lease. Leasing capacity in data centers outside China gives Tencent a way to use comparable computing p...