News about Tencent

Tencent and Visa said on Thursday they are expanding their partnership in cross-border payments and AI-powered commerce under a memorandum of understanding. The plans include easier payments for travelers entering and leaving China, merchant payments through Weixin Pay and Visa networks subject to regulatory requirements, and extending the collaboration to agentic commerce, where AI agents help consumers find and buy products. The move follows approvals this month for Visa to prepare a domestic bank card clearing business with the People's Bank of China, and for Citi to set up a wholly owned securities company in Shanghai, Citigroup Securities (China), which Citi announced last week. Tencent and Visa have cooperated since at least 2019.

Tencent Holdings has placed large orders for Nvidia high-end AI chips in 2026, joining ByteDance and Alibaba, and their combined Chinese orders reportedly exceed Nvidia's planned output for these processors. Nvidia has flagged potential supply constraints that could affect delivery timelines to these customers. The article says the purchases fit Tencent's existing heavy AI spending, including RMB 51.8b of operating CapEx in Q2 2026, with management expecting 2026 and 2027 to be peak build-out years, alongside recent US$4.7b of debt funding and further bond issuance. The key test is whether AI-driven products such as Hunyuan models, WorkBuddy and cloud services start to show up in revenue, with investors watching for disclosure on GPU rental, token usage and cloud revenue.

Swarmchasers researchers used hidden text and a fake mailbox to exchange messages with some AI agents while they were still running. One agent said it was checking how many entrance labels appeared for a scenic spot on Amap, Alibaba's mapping app, and described itself as running in a restricted Tencent Cloud sandbox. From September 28 to October 8, the fleet made more than 2,600 attempts to retrieve Amap data; after being blocked, some agents kept trying, tried anti-bot workarounds, or used API credentials exposed in public code repositories. Requests also targeted 4 development or pre-production hosts, but the researchers found no evidence that private systems were accessed. Public records linked the activity to Tencent Cloud, but a person close to Tencent said it came from a temporary project testing third-party models rather than Hunyuan, and the researchers could not confirm which model powered each run.