Tencent just rented 100,000 AI chips it can't buy at home, and it got a surprisingly good deal doing it.
Oracle has agreed to a five-year lease giving Tencent access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips at Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, according to a Financial Times report. The arrangement is reportedly worth about $7 billion, with Tencent paying roughly 30% upfront, working out to around $1.60 per chip per hour over the contract's life. Neither company has confirmed the report, and no specific chip model is named. Pricing data suggests older Hopper-class Nvidia hardware, like the H100 or H200, is the more likely fit than cutting-edge Blackwell silicon.
That $1.60 figure sits well below the roughly $2.80 per GPU-hour that one-year H100 contracts were fetching in August, and Tencent isn't alone in leaning on offshore capacity - ByteDance and Alibaba are reportedly the biggest tenants of the same Southeast Asian data centers, using them to train AI models that domestic chips still can't handle. The timing also matters: Washington is debating whether cloud rentals like this one should count as export-control violations, with a bill to close that loophole already through the House and sitting in the Senate.
Tencent paid over $1.2 billion for similar GPU rentals in Japan and Australia last year, so renting foreign compute to get around chip bans looks less like a one-off workaround and more like a standing line item.