Tencent has signed a five-year agreement with Oracle to lease access to about 100,000 advanced artificial intelligence chips that are unavailable in China, City News Service reported, citing the Financial Times.
The contract is estimated to be worth $7 billion, with around 30% payable upfront. The processors would be installed across several data centers in Southeast Asia, according to the same report. These figures reflect the projected value of the contract and do not by themselves establish that the full amount has already been paid.
The outlet said the deal would be Tencent’s largest agreement to lease chips outside China. The company is expanding its computing-capacity requirements as it develops language models and other generative artificial intelligence products. City News Service also reported that Tencent recently unveiled a preview of an image-generation tool aimed at professional creators, featuring text-to-image and image-to-image capabilities.
