Tencent has signed a five-year lease to use about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle. People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times about the deal. The chips, which are not available in China, sit in several Oracle data centres in South-East Asia.

The deal, signed this year, is worth about $7bn, and Tencent is paying about 30% upfront, Zijing Wu reported. It is the Chinese company’s largest overseas lease deal with a US cloud provider. US export rules allow overseas cloud leases like this, according to the FT. TNW has not independently verified the report.

Chinese tech groups have rented compute abroad before. ByteDance brought in nearly 75% of Nscale’s 2025 sales, the UK cloud firm’s filings showed.

Tencent’s cash flow turned negative in the second quarter, at RMB 13.8bn ($2.06bn). According to the FT, it was the first negative figure in more than a decade. Chief financial officer John Lo put it down to heavy AI infrastructure spending and prepayments for compute, DatacenterDynamics reported.

“We’re comfortable in making significant investments in AI because not only is there a substantial upside potential, there is also clear downside protection,” Tencent president Martin Lau has said.

Executives said the compute would go first to training bigger Hunyuan models, then to running them. Later, Tencent Cloud could rent it out. Tencent also backs Chinese chipmaker Enflame, which nearly tripled in its Shanghai debut in September.

A lift for Oracle

Oracle shares barely moved on Thursday after the report, Investor’s Business Daily reported. They had fallen 29.5% this year going into the day. Oracle’s free cash flow has been below zero for several quarters, IBD noted, because of its AI spending. The company is spending on data centres more than it earns in a quarter.