Oracle has cancelled a five-year deal to lease artificial intelligence chip capacity to Tencent, worth about $7 billion, the Financial Times reported. The information was published on November 4, 2026, and attributed to people familiar with the matter.
The agreement, first reported by the newspaper in September, would have given Tencent access to as many as 100,000 advanced chips in Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia. It would have been the Chinese company's largest overseas chip lease ever.
According to the Financial Times, US officials approached Oracle to raise concerns about the deal. Officials from Guangdong province, where Tencent is based, also reportedly visited the company to ask it to support domestic Chinese chip suppliers.
What is known and what remains unconfirmed
The status of this information matters: it is a reported development, not an official announcement. Reuters, relaying the report, said it could not independently verify the cancellation and that Oracle, Tencent and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This article is an update to a story Geekiki already covered: in October, we reported the original deal to lease 100,000 chips in Southeast Asia. Read the earlier article at Tencent Oracle chips de IA: aluguel de 100 mil no Sudeste Asiático.
Why Southeast Asia matters
The case illustrates a broader squeeze on China's access to advanced computing abroad: scrutiny now reaches not only hardware sales, but also the leasing of cloud capacity in data centers outside China. The Financial Times also reported that Nvidia had told cloud clients they must sell at least 51% of their services to non-Chinese companies.
Image credit: BrokenSphere, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA licence), photo of Oracle's headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.
Sources: Reuters, via the Financial Times; The Hindu BusinessLine, based on the Financial Times; Invezz.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public posts and the internet sources cited above. Readers are advised to consult the original sources to confirm the details.
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