BEIJING/SINGAPORE, March 18 (Reuters) – Tencent Holdings said on Wednesday it plans to increase investment in artificial intelligence this year, including developing proprietary models, after acknowledging that chip export restrictions held back its 2025 spending plans.
President Martin Lau told reporters following the release of strong fourth-quarter results that the company aims to boost capital expenditure in 2026, though he did not say by how much.
The Chinese tech giant’s total capex spend reached about 79 billion yuan ($11.49 billion) last year, up from 77 billion yuan in 2024 but below internal expectations due to constraints in acquiring advanced AI chips, Lau said.
To compete with rivals such as Alibaba Group and ByteDance, Tencent has ramped up AI talent acquisition, including recently hiring former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu to lead the development of its proprietary Hunyuan large language model.
It spent 1 billion yuan promoting its Yuanbao AI chatbot during the Lunar New Year holiday period to gain market share in China’s increasingly crowded AI sector.
This month, it launched its “OpenClaw” AI product suite, comprising QClaw for individual users, Lighthouse for developers and WorkBuddy for enterprises, as competition intensifies around AI agents – software that can perform multi-step tasks autonomously.
Company executives said they are developing a new AI agent for its WeChat messaging and payments app and will soon release Hunyuan 3.0, an upgraded version of its proprietary model.
STRONG GROWTH
Tencent reported total revenue of 194.4 billion yuan for the three months to end-December, up 13% from a year earlier and slightly above the 193.5 billion yuan average estimate of analysts polled by LSEG.
The results were driven by strong gaming performance, with domestic gaming revenue rising by 15% and international gaming revenue growing more than 30%.
Online advertising revenue climbed 17% to 41.1 billion yuan, boosted by AI-enhanced ad targeting.
Quarterly net profit was 58.26 billion yuan, compared with an average estimate of 57.75 billion yuan.
($1 = 6.8726 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Liam Mo and Miyoung Kim. Editing by Mark Potter and Pooja Desai, Kirsten Donovan)
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