Tencent sustains revenue growth to bankroll costly AI investment

Tencent Holdings revenue grew a faster-than-projected 11%, keeping up the steady pace of expansion it needs to finance a costly AI services and infrastructure build out.

Revenue for the three months ended June climbed to 204.8 billion yuan ($30.4 billion), beating the average analyst forecast by about 1%. Net income however barely rose, depressed by a one-time accounting loss on an unnamed, unlisted investee. Tencent’s capital expenditures in the quarter soared more than 65% from the previous three months to 52.8 billion yuan, reflecting the mounting expense of acquiring the AI accelerators and memory chips essential to the technology. Shares in Prosus NV, a major shareholder, slid as much as 4.4% in Europe.

China’s largest company kicks off the domestic Big Tech earnings season, when investors will seek clarity on envisioned returns from a pricey AI build out. Tencent is showing early signs of traction through its Hunyuan foundation model and productivity agent WorkBuddy. It still has ground to make up on ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding, but online advertising has emerged as a fast-growing segment that’s giving the company a solid cash cushion to fund tech investments.

The big drivers of top-line growth were a 17% surge in domestic gaming revenues and a 22% leap in marketing sales. Tencent executives have described how AI is helping its clients better target users among the billion-plus people who use its super-app WeChat on a constant basis across the country.

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Like their Silicon Valley peers, China’s tech majors are confronting scepticism over the timeline for an AI payoff. Still, Tencent’s outlay remains among the most conservative: Alibaba has pledged more than $50 billion over three years toward AI infrastructure. Tencent has refrained from setting a multiyear target, saying only that its investment in AI products will double this year.

On Wednesday, the company emphasised the progress it was making on AI-era products, as well as the investments it intends to make to sustain that momentum.

The Shenzhen-based company last month launched the official version of Hy3 — a rebranding of the Hunyuan series — marking a major upgrade led by former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu. While the model faces intense pressure from open-weight Chinese rivals such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi, Tencent has hedged its bets by joining DeepSeek’s debut funding round and integrating the startup’s V4 platform across its ecosystem.

Building on its strength in product design dating back to the mobile internet era, Tencent is now attempting to transform WeChat into an AI-first interface. The company is testing a native AI agent embedded within the super-app that can help users hail rides and summarise group messages — functioning as an operating system-level assistant akin to Apple Inc.’s Siri. Tencent’s WorkBuddy also gained rapid momentum as China’s most popular AI office tool, amassing 21 million monthly visits in June.

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In gaming, Tencent relies on several evergreen titles, such as Honor of Kings, Peacekeeper Elite and Delta Force. But it is taking a more disciplined approach to international expansion during a global video game downturn, cutting studio investments in Japan and trimming staff at the international outposts of flagship studios LightSpeed and TiMi.

Tencent has shed roughly $170 billion of market value this year as global investors rotated out of traditional tech platforms and into hardware suppliers and pure-play AI developers. Rebuilding momentum will depend on proving that its AI investments can generate reliable top-line growth rather than merely defending its existing ecosystem.

“As chip supply improves in 2H26 and compute constraints ease, we expect Tencent to expand WeChat AI’s grey-scale testing to a broader user base,” Morgan Stanley analysts led by Gary Yu wrote in July. Tencent’s AI product portfolio “should continue to evolve alongside the HY LLM, reinforcing a virtuous cycle between model and application development.”

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