Tencent has signed a reported $7 billion, five-year lease with Oracle for access to about 100,000 advanced artificial-intelligence chips across data centers in Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. The deal is Tencent’s largest overseas lease agreement and includes an upfront payment of about 30%, which weighed on the company’s free cash flow in the second quarter. Reuters could not immediately verify the report. U.S. rules restrict Chinese technology companies from directly buying some advanced AI chips, but allow them to lease computing capacity internationally, giving Tencent access to Nvidia processors that are not generally available in China. Tencent is accelerating development of its Hunyuan AI models and integrating AI into products including WeChat as it competes with Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and Alibaba. Its spending on AI has increased pressure on margins and profitability. The arrangement also adds to demand for Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, where the company reported more than 300,000 GPUs delivered to AI cloud customers since the previous quarter and utilization of 97.9% in its Q1 FY27 results.