Oracle cancels €6.4bn Tencent chip lease after US pressure
Oracle has cancelled a planned five-year deal to lease Tencent access to as many as 100,000 advanced AI chips through data centres in South-east Asia. The Financial Times reported that US officials raised concerns with Oracle, while officials in China’s Guangdong province urged Tencent to support domestic chipmakers; Reuters said it could not independently verify the report.
Bottom line — The cancelled lease was valued at about €6.4bn (US$7bn) and would have been Tencent’s largest overseas chip-rental deal.
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The Financial Times said the chips could not be used in China because of restrictions imposed by Washington and Beijing.
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According to the Financial Times, Chinese AI developers are seeking overseas computing capacity partly because domestic chips cannot yet handle all model-training tasks.
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The Financial Times reported that such overseas leases are allowed under current rules, but US companies face growing pressure to limit business with Chinese customers.
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The Financial Times also reported that Nvidia told cloud clients to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese customers.
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The Financial Times said ByteDance and Alibaba remain among the biggest customers of South-east Asian data centres; Oracle is also a major supplier to ByteDance in Asia.