Photo: Nana Dua / Pexels
Tencent leases 100,000 AI chips from Oracle in five-year deal
The Chinese tech giant will tap Oracle's Asia data centers as demand for large-scale AI compute keeps climbing
Tencent has signed a five-year agreement to lease 100,000 AI chips from Oracle. The deal was reported on October 1, 2026.
The chips will run across Oracle’s data centers in Asia. Tencent gets the compute without building the server farms itself.
The deal and the numbers behind it
The core arrangement is simple. Tencent receives access to 100,000 AI chips for five years, hosted inside Oracle’s Asia footprint.
The research describes the move as part of Tencent’s push to expand its AI capabilities.
The timing lines up with a busy stretch for Oracle’s cloud business. In its Q1 FY27 results, Oracle said it delivered more than 300,000 GPUs to AI cloud customers since the prior quarter.
GPU utilization in that quarter hit 97.9%.
Another detail stands out. Oracle said older GPUs have been renewed or resold at a premium of approximately 20%.
AI, tech, and the markets they move—in one daily briefing.
Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy.
Oracle’s big bet on long leases
Oracle has disclosed uncommenced data-center and cloud lease commitments of approximately $248 billion to $288 billion.
The lease terms typically run 15 to 19 years. They are set to begin in fiscal years 2027 through 2029.
Oracle’s customer agreements average about 5 to 6 years. Tencent’s five-year deal fits that pattern.
Who else is renting from Oracle
Tencent joins a customer list that already includes OpenAI and ByteDance. ByteDance is described as one of Oracle’s largest GPU customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Oracle has helped ByteDance establish AI hubs in Singapore and the surrounding area.
What this means
The risk sits in the gap between lease lengths. Oracle’s real estate obligations stretch 15 to 19 years, while customer deals average 5 to 6 years.
For Tencent, leasing gives it rapid access to 100,000 chips without the upfront cost and delay of building its own data centers. A five-year term also offers flexibility, as AI hardware evolves quickly.
The deal also signals how Chinese tech firms are sourcing compute. Rather than relying solely on domestic infrastructure, both Tencent and ByteDance are turning to Oracle’s Asia data centers to scale their AI work.
What to watch next: Oracle’s upcoming quarterly utilization numbers, any further large Asia customer announcements, and whether the premium on older GPUs holds.