Oracle drops $7B Tencent AI chip lease under US pressure

Oracle has walked away from a five-year, $7 billion contract that would have leased Tencent roughly 100,000 advanced AI chips through Oracle data centres in Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported, after officials from the Trump administration approached the US company to raise concerns.

The chips were, in the paper's wording, "not available in China due to curbs from Washington and Beijing." Oracle itself was not blocked by law. Overseas AI chip leasing "remains permitted under existing rules," the reporting says, and the arrangement was killed by pressure rather than by any new rule.

Tencent was squeezed from both sides. The FT says the Chinese company also received visits from "top officials in Guangdong, where the group is based, who asked the company to support domestic Chinese chips." Reuters, carrying the report, called what Oracle has lost "the Chinese firm's largest ever overseas deal."

Neither Oracle nor Tencent is quoted confirming the cancellation in the material filtering out through secondary wires; the account rests on the FT's sources and has been relayed by Bloomberg and others. It lands in the same week Nvidia is leaning on OpenAI and think tanks to shape chip-export rules, one of 319 chip stories logged in our tracker over the last 90 days.