Oracle cancels $7bn Tencent AI deal under Trump pressure

Oracle has scrapped a five-year chip leasing contract, estimated at $7bn, that gave Tencent access to as many as 100,000 advanced AI chips across data centres in south-east Asia, according to two people familiar with the matter. The FT first reported the deal in September; it was Tencent's largest overseas leasing deal. US officials approached Oracle to raise concerns, per the two people, and separately Guangdong officials visited Tencent to ask it to support domestic Chinese chips, per one of them. Oracle, Tencent and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FT links the move to its 3 Nov report that Nvidia told cloud clients to sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies. Overseas leasing is legal, but US companies are under pressure to cut Chinese exposure; ByteDance and Alibaba remain the biggest clients of south-east Asian data centres, and Oracle is a major ByteDance supplier with several data centres in Malaysia (it hosted TikTok US data before joining the consortium that bought TikTok's US operations). Tencent's latest Hunyuan models are closing the gap with Alibaba's Qwen. Caveats: the story is short and rests on anonymous sources with no on-record confirmation, and gives no Oracle financial impact, agencies involved, legal grounds, sites or dates.