Tencent has agreed to rent offshore AI computing capacity from Oracle in a deal valued at $7 billion, covering 100,000 chips, according to a report by the Financial Times. The arrangement gives the Chinese cloud and internet company access to Oracle data centers located outside China, with Tencent renting time on the hardware rather than owning it. Neither company has named the chips involved, and details such as the countries, sites, and start date remain undisclosed.
The reported pricing works out to roughly 43% below the approximately $2.80 per GPU-hour that Nvidia's H100 commands under a one-year contract, according to August research from SemiAnalysis. It is also about 48% cheaper than the $3.09 per GPU-hour attached to a three-year contract for Nvidia's B200, per a 2025 filing by Japanese data center operator Datasection for an unnamed customer. Without specifics on the hardware, it is not possible to determine whether this is a bulk deal or whether the leasing costs sit closer to actual hardware cost.
The rate better fits Hopper-class hardware at volume, which includes the H100 and H200. The H200 has seen limited imports, which could satisfy the condition that the chips in the deal are unavailable in China. Tencent president Martin Lau said on a call that the company could sell its existing orders at more than 30% profit compared with what it paid a few months ago.
Oracle has two cloud regions in Singapore and has announced one in Malaysia. The FT reported that the largest clients of Southeast Asian data centers are ByteDance and Alibaba, with Chinese firms using the capacity particularly for AI training that domestic chips cannot yet handle. Tencent previously signed a deal worth more than $1.2 billion for Datasection Blackwell rentals in Japan and Australia, the FT reported in December 2025.
The arrangement sits in a thorny legal space. The Remote Access Security Act, a bipartisan bill that passed the House 369 to 22 in January, would give the U.S. government authority to regulate remote cloud access to sensitive technology, potentially covering these chips, and currently sits in the Senate Banking Committee. Export Administration Regulations license requirements under the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security have covered shipments of advanced AI chips, including to China-headquartered companies abroad, since November 2023, while cloud rentals were left out. Tencent's placement on the Pentagon's 1260H list of Chinese military companies does not bar the deal, as it is not a sanction, and no regulatory official made a statement about it.
Oracle's Investor Day is scheduled for Oct. 28 in Las Vegas during its Oct. 25 to 28 Oracle AI World event, which could be a chance to disclose hardware details. Tencent is expected to report third-quarter results the following month.
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