Tencent Holdings Ltd

Chinese AI startup Manus raised more than $500M in a funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, its first major fundraise since China blocked Meta Platforms' planned $2B-plus acquisition of the company. Butterfly Effect, Manus' parent company, said existing investors Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund also participated in the round. The company did not disclose its latest valuation or how it plans to use the proceeds, but said it would continue hiring in China and internationally. Meta announced the deal in December 2025 after Manus, which was founded in China, relocated its operations to Singapore, and Manus subsequently resumed independent operations. The latest funding follows reports in September that Manus was seeking to raise $500M at a $4B valuation, which would be roughly double the value of the proposed Meta transaction, though the valuation has not yet been confirmed.

The AI narrative is shifting from model capability competition to the commercialization of agents. On September 29 local time, OpenAI released its next-generation agent product Dot, powered by GPT-6 Astra, equipped with an independent cloud computer and browser, and able to connect to more than 4,000 applications through a plugin ecosystem. It is now being gradually rolled out to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium users. On October 7, OpenAI officially launched GPT-6 to ChatGPT users worldwide, with the paid version using GPT-6 Sol and the free and Go versions using GPT-6 Luna. Domestic players are following suit. Tencent's self-developed creative agent Miora went fully live on July 22, Doubao updated to version 0915 on September 15, and the DeepSeek agent framework DeepSeek Harness released a new version on October 3. According to iResearch, AI agent product sales are expected to reach nearly 200 billion yuan by 2035, while the enterprise intelligence economy driven by AI-native enterprise services will be worth about 1.9 trillion yuan. According to Securities Times Data Treasure, as of the close on October 8, agent concept stocks have fallen by an average of 20.63 percent this year, with seven concept stocks rising more than 10 percent against the trend. A total of 39 concept stocks have received positive ratings from five or more institutions, with Hisense Visual Technology ranking first with ratings from 28 institutions.

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek has raised $12 billion in a new funding round, according to Bloomberg, with backing from Tencent and CATL, setting the stage for a potential IPO. Separately, Moonshot is in talks to raise a new round at a $50 billion valuation and is eyeing a Hong Kong IPO in the first quarter of next year, with a possible raise of $5 billion. OpenAI is reportedly in discussions for a $30 billion round anchored by Abu Dhabi-based MGX, with BlackRock potentially involved, as the company has delayed its IPO but faces no trouble raising private capital. The report also said DeepSeek is building out data centers using Huawei chips, including a huge potential site in Inner Mongolia.

Chinese artificial intelligence group DeepSeek is set to raise at least 80 billion yuan, or $12 billion, in a funding round backed by Tencent and CATL, according to Bloomberg News. The company had initially sought 50 billion yuan, but investor demand far exceeded expectations, and the final tally could rise as high as 100 billion yuan. DeepSeek, which shot to fame with its R1 open-source AI model in 2025, is regarded as one of China's most advanced AI labs, and earlier reports placed its valuation at about $74 billion. Investors are also closely watching the startup's plans to seek a public listing. In other market news, Gulf oil exporters surpassed pre-war export levels for roughly half of September, with the seven-day moving average for crude exports from the region at 18.3 million barrels per day on September 30, and Constellation Brands is due to report quarterly results after the closing bell, with comparable operating profit tipped at $872.3 million on comparable net sales of $2.53 billion.

Major commercial banks in Asia are increasingly extending loans backed by GPUs as collateral, aiming to ride a wave of regional data center investment that PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates will reach $8.2 trillion by 2050. Most of that capital is being spent on hardware such as GPUs and servers. Over the past few months, banks have taken part in GPU-backed loan deals totaling roughly $3.8 billion for AI infrastructure providers including GMI Cloud, Zankore and PaleBlueDot AI. Citigroup was the sole debt advisor on Zankore's $3.1 billion loan in Indonesia, while JPMorgan Chase arranged financing for PaleBlueDot AI. GMI Cloud is in talks with banks and private credit lenders for a new loan of about $300 million to buy chips for a data center in Thailand, with Tencent as the end user of those chips. Xiaohongshu, meanwhile, plans to buy computing capacity from PaleBlueDot AI's chips for a project in Japan. The key risk is that GPUs can lose value quickly when manufacturers release new chip models, while returns on GPU-backed loans are generally only about 100 to 200 basis points higher than other AI infrastructure loans. Reliance on Chinese customers also adds regulatory risk stemming from U.S. restrictions on advanced chip exports.

flydubai, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, announced a temporary suspension of all flight services to and from Israel pending the results of an official factual investigation, after unrest broke out on flight FZ1073 last Wednesday. A first officer is suspected of using a knife to attack the captain inside the cockpit and attempting to force the aircraft into a dive, before passengers and off-duty pilots on board subdued the suspect and landed the plane safely in an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump praised the Boeing 737 Max today, after the aircraft model was involved in the attempted downing of the flydubai plane as it headed for Tel Aviv, Israel. Separately, Google, a company under Alphabet, announced on Wednesday the launch of its new top-tier artificial intelligence model, Gemini 4 Argon, as the spearhead of its Gemini 4 generation of models, amid a fresh push to catch up with key rivals OpenAI and Anthropic after months of delays. Tencent, a major Chinese internet company, signed an agreement to lease about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle over five years for 7 billion dollars, and Huawei Technologies officially unveiled its flagship Mate 90 Series smartphones today, relying on its own developed operating system and a restructured chip architecture amid strict U.S. controls on advanced semiconductor exports.

Micron unveiled an upbeat quarterly revenue forecast that topped expectations, sending its shares higher in extended-hours trading. The Idaho-based chipmaker said customers had increased their commitments under its long-term supply agreements to $32 billion, up from $22 billion reported in June, as businesses race to secure memory chips for AI data centers. Micron's stock price has more than tripled so far this year, giving the company a $1 trillion market capitalization. Separately, Nike was due to release its latest results after the closing bell, with investors watching for progress in CEO Elliott Hill's turnaround strategy; Nike shares have slumped by more than 44% this year and the company was removed from the S&P 100 this month. Tencent signed a $7 billion lease deal with Oracle for access to about 100,000 advanced artificial intelligence chips, the Financial Times reported, in what would be Tencent's largest ever overseas lease agreement.

InnovestX Securities has unveiled its investment strategy for the fourth quarter of 2026, saying investors need to exercise greater caution amid rising interest rates and high oil prices, which are pressuring inflation, bond yields, and foreign fund flows. The firm set a target for Thailand's benchmark stock index in 2027 at 1,715 points and said the 1,550 level is starting to look attractive for accumulation. It named five top picks: AMATA, CENTEL, CRC, KTB, and PR9. Suthichai Kumworachai, Head of Investment Strategy & Research, said the prolonged conflict between the United States and Iran creates a chain of risk running from oil prices to inflation, the direction of interest rates, financing costs, and the baht. Dr. Piyasak Manasant, Head of Economic Research, kept his forecast for Thai economic growth in 2026 and 2027 at 2.0% while raising his average oil price assumptions for 2026 and 2027 to 90 and 80 US dollars per barrel, respectively. Sitthichai Duangrattanachaya, Head of Investment Strategy, said earnings per share for the Thai stock market have been continuously revised upward, particularly from the energy sector. For overseas investment, he recommended stocks that benefit from AI, namely Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Tencent, and Alibaba, while in the semiconductor group he highlighted Lumentum, Naura, SMIC, and Biren. He also advised diversifying into defensive and dividend stocks. Joranapong Rattanasopha, Head of Investment Product Specialist, recommended the M-SCHD fund, which invests through the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF. SCHD currently has less than 10% exposure to technology stocks, compared with nearly 40% for the S&P 500 index, and the correlation between SCHD and the S&P 500 has fallen to about 0.3, the lowest level since the fund was established in 2011.

Tencent has signed a five-year lease with Oracle for access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. The agreement, Tencent's largest overseas lease deal, covers multiple Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia and is estimated to be worth about $7B, with roughly 30% paid upfront. The deal gives the Shenzhen-based company access to advanced chips that are not available in China, helping it secure additional computing capacity for AI model development and agentic tools. The lease comes as Chinese technology companies increasingly look overseas for computing capacity because of limited domestic supply and tighter U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips. Tencent has been accelerating its AI infrastructure spending, with capital expenditure jumping 176% Y/Y to 53B yuan, or about $7.9B, in Q2, while for Oracle the deal helps diversify its AI customer base beyond OpenAI.

Tencent Cloud has unveiled Palm X, a new palmprint verification solution from its PalmAI technology that is designed to work with standard RGB cameras. The solution extends palm verification to widely available camera-equipped devices such as smartphones, letting enterprises add palm-based identity verification to mobile applications and digital services without dedicated palm-scanning hardware. Palm X supports 1:1 identity verification and one-to-many palmprint matching within defined enrolled user groups, and it incorporates liveness detection mechanisms intended to mitigate presentation attacks such as photos and screen replays. For enterprise deployment, it can be integrated into existing authentication and risk-control systems through mobile SDKs and backend APIs, serving as a complementary authentication factor alongside passwords, SMS verification codes, facial verification, and passkeys. Sine, Director of Palm X Product at Tencent Cloud, said facial recognition is widely adopted today while businesses and users seek more diverse approaches to biometric verification, and that Palm X offers a palmprint-based option compatible with standard RGB cameras.

Tencent Cloud has announced the official launch of Tencent Cloud DataBuddy, a fully managed, agent-native Data plus AI workbench that joins Tencent CodeBuddy and WorkBuddy as the company's third assistant-class product. The platform embeds intelligent agents as core components that understand business logic, execute operational tasks, and operate within a governed framework, and it currently supports four primary agent scenarios: Data Engineering, Data Governance, Data Analytics, and Data Science. Tencent Cloud said the Data Science scenario reduces model deployment from 30 days to 7. The platform rests on three foundations: Unity Semantics, a business semantic layer delivering 95.9% analysis accuracy versus 83.5% for plain Natural Language to SQL; an Agent Runtime layer built for governance, auditability and data controls; and OneOps, which unifies DataOps, MLOps and AIOps in one platform, together delivering 5x to 10x efficiency gains across data teams. Tencent Cloud DataBuddy is currently available in markets including China, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia, with rollouts under way across Europe, North America and South America, and enterprises can connect existing OLAP engines with zero data movement or adopt the unified storage and compute platform while retaining full control over data sovereignty.

Tencent Holdings shares rose more than 5% in Hong Kong on Tuesday after the company introduced a new image-generation system, adding another step to its push into consumer artificial intelligence. The Hy Image 3.5 Preview model is being added to Tencent's Yuanbao chatbot as well as tools used for video editing and design, and the company said the system improves on its previous version and expands its AI capabilities beyond text. Tencent is also positioning the technology for its broader WeChat ecosystem, which serves more than one billion users, as it increases its focus on practical AI applications amid intensifying competition among Chinese technology companies. The launch coincided with Alibaba Group holding its annual AI conference, where it outlined plans for much larger AI models and introduced a new chip. Tencent's latest model was tested internally by hundreds of designers, and the company said the system performed around the level of ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro in those tests, while comparisons with competing models showed varying results.

W4 Games announced a multi-year partnership with Tencent on 21 September 2026, alongside a Series B round that lifts its total funding to US$33.00 million, to expand the open-source Godot game engine and related enterprise tools across Asia through localization, ecosystem support and go-to-market initiatives. The collaboration ties Tencent more closely to the fast-growing Godot open-source ecosystem, where Godot-powered games on Steam have grown very rapidly and higher-earning titles have risen from two to more than 50 in three years. The partnership modestly reinforces Tencent's international gaming and cloud narratives but does not meaningfully change the near-term balance between AI investment pressures and regulatory risk, which remain the key swing factors for the stock. Tencent's narrative projects CN¥1,040.3 billion revenue and CN¥295.2 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 9.7% yearly revenue growth and about CN¥59.7 billion earnings increase from CN¥235.5 billion today, and yields a HK$665.19 fair value, a 47% upside to its current price. The most pessimistic analysts already assumed slower revenue growth of about 7.4 percent and profit margins falling toward 24.4 percent, so they might treat Tencent's Godot push as interesting but still secondary to concerns about heavier AI spending and thinner cash cushions.

Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of Tencent, announced a partnership with regional fintech leader and digital bank Boost to support its digital transformation and innovation initiatives across Malaysia and Indonesia. The collaboration spans three pillars: Tencent Cloud will provide scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities to Boost in both markets, Boost will use Tencent Cloud Super App as a Service to unify multiple financial services into a single application, and the two will co-create products on Boost's AI development roadmap. Poshu Yeung, Senior Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent Cloud International, said Southeast Asia remains one of the world's most dynamic digital economies, and Sheyantha Abeykoon, Group Chief Executive Officer of Boost, said the tie-up strengthens Boost's technology foundation while exploring new AI-driven capabilities and super app experiences. Boost, a recent honoree on the CNBC and Statista World's Top Fintech Companies 2026 list, operates in Malaysia and Indonesia, where it runs Boost Bank by Axiata and RHB.

Tencent Holdings shares listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange surged 6.6% to 458.40 Hong Kong dollars at 10:55 a.m. Thailand time, after the company launched a new version of its artificial intelligence image generation model. The stock had risen 2.6% the previous day. The new model, named Hy-Image-3.5-Preview, supports text-to-image generation, image-to-image generation, and multi-round image editing, can produce images at resolutions up to 4K, and supports multimodal input, according to documents from Tencent Cloud. The launch comes as Chinese technology companies intensify competition in the generative AI market, with Tencent expanding the use of its Hunyuan family of models across various products and services, including the Yuanbao AI assistant and other applications. The move follows Alibaba's unveiling of an aggressive AI strategy at the Apsara Conference, where it said it plans to train new models with between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters, potentially 2 to 4 times larger than its current flagship Qwen 3.8 Max model, and also launched a new AI chip, pressing ahead with building a full-stack AI ecosystem spanning chips, data centers, models, and AI agents.

Tencent Holdings, through Tencent Cloud, has entered a new partnership with Malaysian mobile operator U Mobile to develop enterprise 5G and AI solutions. The agreement focuses on offering cloud based, AI enabled services to Malaysian businesses that use U Mobile's 5G network. The collaboration marks Tencent Cloud's first official AI focused tie up with a telecommunications provider in Malaysia. The U Mobile tie up is only one part of the broader Tencent Holdings story, fitting into its existing business services arm rather than operating as a standalone side project, and it signals Tencent Cloud trying to turn its AI tools into exportable infrastructure for emerging Asian markets. Investors are advised to watch how management frames Tencent Cloud's Malaysia region and 5G collaborations in upcoming quarterly reports, especially any concrete disclosure on enterprise customer wins or AI service usage tied to U Mobile beyond 2026.

Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of Tencent, has signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding with U Mobile, Malaysia's newest 5G network provider, to explore practical 5G and AI solutions for enterprises and SMEs. The collaboration combines Tencent Cloud's AI and cloud capabilities with U Mobile's ULTRA5G network, enterprise reach and Enterprise Innovation Platform, and marks Tencent Cloud's first official AI-focused partnership with a Malaysian telecommunications provider. As a strategic partner of the Enterprise Innovation Platform, Tencent Cloud will work with U Mobile through the platform's Develop, Test and Demonstrate pathway, under which selected AI-driven digital solutions can be developed and validated against real industry challenges, with successful use cases potentially progressing to pilot deployments, commercialisation and go-to-market opportunities. Poshu Yeung, Senior Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent Cloud International, said the partnership will help enterprises, SMEs and developers build impactful 5G and AI applications, while U Mobile Chief Technology Officer Woon Ooi Yuen said the tie-up brings together 5G, AI and cloud technologies to turn promising ideas into practical solutions. The two companies will engage businesses, startups, developers, academia and technology partners through workshops, demonstrations, innovation sessions and pilot showcases, and will exchange technical expertise in 5G, AI, system integration, security and enterprise deployment.

Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame Technology soared more than 223% in its Shanghai debut on Friday after raising 6.12 billion yuan, or $912 million, in its initial public offering. The Tencent-backed company opened at RMB 410 and climbed as high as RMB 460, according to the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Enflame is considered one of China's "four little dragons" of AI chipmaking and is the last of that group to go public, following MetaX's and Moore Threads' debuts last year and Biren Technology's listing in January. Investors are betting domestic chipmakers can chip away at Nvidia's dominance in China, where Nvidia-led international players controlled nearly 60% of the country's AI accelerator market in 2025, according to IDC data cited in Enflame's prospectus. Founded in 2018, Enflame posted revenue of RMB 990 million, or $147.62 million, in 2025, up from RMB 722 million the previous year, though it has yet to turn a profit, and it said it will use the IPO proceeds to develop and commercialize its fifth- and sixth-generation AI chips.

Enflame Technology, a Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker backed by Tencent, listed on the Shanghai market on the 11th, with its share price surging about 200 percent. The company raised 6.12 billion yuan, or 912 million dollars, in its initial public offering. Its shares opened at 410 yuan against an offer price of 142.18 yuan, climbed as high as 475 yuan, and then fell back to around 430 yuan. Shen Meng, a director at Beijing-based investment bank Chanson Capital, said the company's graphics processing chip business offers investors a clear growth outlook, and that interest in domestic substitutes has risen amid US restrictions on advanced chip supplies to China. Tencent is Enflame Technology's largest shareholder, with a 17.95 percent stake after the initial public offering. According to the prospectus, Tencent-related business accounted for 83.79 percent of the company's revenue in 2025.

DeepSeek's implied valuation on the secondary market has climbed to approximately $71 billion even after its formal fundraising process stalled, according to reports cited by the Financial Times. The company closed its first major external round in June 2026 at a $52 billion post-money valuation, raising $7.4 billion from investors including Tencent, CATL, and NetEase, with founder Liang Wenfeng personally committing $3 billion. A follow-on attempt to raise a second round at a $71 billion pre-money target was suspended on July 25, 2026, after leaked comments from the founder about China's AI lag and dependence on Nvidia chips went viral. With the primary market closed, Special Purpose Vehicles offering DeepSeek equity with escalating fees and five-year lock-ups have proliferated, as investors weigh the liquidity risk against a potential Q2 2027 debut on the Shanghai STAR Market. The company, which generates $500 million in annualized revenue and posts 70-80% gross margins on cloud access, is being valued as national infrastructure rather than on standard revenue multiples, with a STAR Market filing targeted for the end of 2026.

Alibaba Group Holding is slated to lead a $300M investment round in AI training and benchmarking startup UniPat AI, valuing the company at $2.5B, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The financing is expected to close soon, with participation from Tencent Holdings Ltd. and existing backer HSG, formerly Sequoia China, though sources noted talks remain in progress and final terms could change. Founded in late 2025 by former Alibaba Tongyi AI lab intern Li Kuan, UniPat generates synthetic training data and designs evaluation scenarios for coding agents, web browser automation, and visual reasoning models. The deal highlights the high premium tech giants are placing on AI testing and synthetic data as frontier models run low on human-generated data and struggle with inflated leaderboard scores. UniPat's research lab also develops lightweight models for scientific research and predictive applications, supported by early investors Monolith and ByteDance-backed Jinqiu Fund, and the company joins a growing global market alongside U.S. data annotation and benchmarking players including Scale AI, Mercor, and Artificial Analysis.

Bilibili Inc. announced the completion of its US$500 million marketed offering of convertible senior notes due 2031, along with a concurrent equity placement and a delta repurchase. The company repurchased 6,795,540 Class Z ordinary shares at the reference price of HK$115.38 per share as part of the Concurrent Delta Repurchase, which is one component of a separate special share repurchase program of up to US$300 million. The Concurrent Equity Placement, totaling 33,351,660 Class Z ordinary shares, included 6,976,760 shares borrowed from third parties and 26,374,900 shares sold by a Tencent subsidiary. The company also repurchased approximately US$100 million of its shares in the overall transaction, while Tencent's subscription for an additional US$200 million in notes and the company's repurchase of approximately US$200 million of shares from Tencent remain subject to shareholder approval at an extraordinary general meeting.

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, is moving forward with plans for an initial public offering in the country, selecting CITIC Securities as its financial advisor for a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market, according to two sources. The company aims to begin the IPO process by 2026, but has not yet set an official timeline, amount, or target valuation. This move comes amid a new funding round that could value the company at up to 500 billion yuan, or approximately $75 billion. Previously, the company raised $7.4 billion in June, with a post-money valuation of over $50 billion. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng personally invested 20 billion yuan, while Tencent Holdings invested 10 billion yuan and CATL invested 5 billion yuan. The new funds will be used to support computing infrastructure, AI model development, and talent retention, amid intense competition with leading AI companies in China and the United States.

Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, has announced a collaboration with Bookme, the fastest-growing travel and e-ticketing platform across the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (MENAP), to provide scalable cloud infrastructure and technical expertise for Bookme's consumer platforms and embedded booking services. Over the past 13 years, Bookme has digitized Pakistan's ticketing industry and now serves more than 15 million customers, with a presence in five additional regions including the Middle East and North Africa. Tencent Cloud's infrastructure, monitoring, security, and support will help Bookme manage extensive global travel inventory—spanning flights across over 500 airlines and more than one million hotels—and handle demand spikes during travel peaks and promotions. The collaboration also supports Bookme's future service enhancements and ecosystem development across multiple markets, reflecting Tencent Cloud's commitment to enabling digital transformation in the travel and technology sectors.

Tencent Holdings has backed a serious homegrown assault on Nvidia's grip over China's roughly $90 billion AI-chip market through its investment in Enflame, which raised $908 million at a $9.1 billion valuation after first-quarter sales growth of 1,475%. Tencent shares slipped 0.99% to HK$438.40 on Monday, trading at $56.6 in the US, leaving the stock 18.46% below its GF Value estimate of $69.41. Enflame is still losing money, so chip performance, customer adoption, and a credible path to profitability are the metrics that matter. Tencent's second-quarter revenue rose 11% to RMB204.8 billion, but capital expenditure rocketed 176% to RMB52.8 billion, and free cash flow slipped to negative RMB13.8 billion. Domestic accelerators could protect Tencent from U.S. export restrictions and strengthen its cloud and AI businesses, but the investment only becomes strategic gold if it delivers cheaper, dependable computing power.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is reportedly preparing to lead a large delegation of business executives on his forthcoming visit to Washington for a September 24 summit with President Trump, according to Reuters. The last significant business contingent led by Xi to the U.S. was in 2015, which included founders and executives from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd, and other Chinese banks and state-owned firms, and during that visit China signed a $38 billion agreement for 300 Boeing Co. aircraft. The inclusion of business leaders could signal China's willingness to support investment and commercial ties with the U.S., and may provide the White House with potential economic victories ahead of the midterm elections, a source told Reuters. Trump has previously visited China with large groups of U.S. business leaders, including Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, among others, to seek greater access to Chinese markets. The upcoming visit could also lead to new announcements on agriculture and non-tariff barriers to expand American farm exports to China, as stated by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who added that they are not looking for another sweeping trade pact but aiming to manage the relationship.

Chinese artificial-intelligence startup Moonshot AI has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO that could raise roughly $3 billion, carrying a valuation of about $50 billion. Founded in 2023 by AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot develops the Kimi family of large language models, with its latest Kimi K3 model featuring 2.8 trillion parameters and a one-million-token context window. The Beijing-based company is working with Goldman Sachs, China International Capital Corp., and Deutsche Bank on the offering, and has raised over $5.5 billion from investors including Alibaba, Tencent, and IDG Capital. Moonshot is also discussing revenue-sharing arrangements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that could place Kimi K3 on major U.S. cloud platforms, seeking up to a 30% share of revenue from such deals. A successful listing would give public investors a rare benchmark for valuing a standalone Chinese large-language-model developer, amid intensifying competition with U.S. AI leaders.

Tencent rose to $56.19 on Wednesday as demand for Enflame's initial public offering surged, with the online tranche subscribed 6,109 times. More than seven million accounts chased the shares, but only 0.025% secured an allocation, roughly one winner per 4,000 applications. Enflame, backed by Tencent, is raising 6.1 billion yuan, or about $908 million, to develop fifth- and sixth-generation AI processors. Tencent's second-quarter results showed revenue rising 11% to 204.8 billion yuan, while attributable profit increased less than 1% to 56 billion yuan. At $56.19, the stock trades 18.55% below its $68.99 GF Value estimate, indicating a valuation gap.

ECARX Holdings Inc. announced that Tencent Cloud's WorkBuddy, an AI-powered smart work assistant, will be integrated with Flyme AIOS, the intelligent operating system ECARX has agreed to acquire, through joint development of WorkBuddy AI tools across the entire Flyme ecosystem. Building on Flyme's existing Super Aicy AI assistant, WorkBuddy will deliver agentic-AI capabilities to all Flyme-powered devices, including smartphones, AI devices, and Flyme Auto for in-vehicle use, creating a unified AI workbench. Users can issue natural-language prompts to draft documents, create reports, organize data, and automate workflows, with WorkBuddy's cloud backend processing requests and returning validated results directly in the conversation thread. WorkBuddy serves 12 industries with over 140 AI advisors and more than 22,000 skills and plugins, offering both on-device processing and secure cloud sandbox execution. Flyme AIOS will become part of ECARX's full-stack software infrastructure, which spans multi-screen cabin interaction, mobile-IoT-vehicle connectivity, middleware, UI/UX frameworks, and application-development toolkits.

Xiaomi is set to unveil a new foldable smartphone on September 7, intensifying competition with Huawei and Apple. The launch is seen as part of the company's strategy to strengthen its presence in the high-end market. Meanwhile, Alibaba has made a minor upgrade to its flagship AI model, and Tencent has officially launched its "WorkBuddy" open platform, with over 100 companies participating. In addition, among China's emerging EV makers' August sales, Leapmotor performed well, while Seres Group fell below 30,000 units for the second consecutive month.