Tencent Holdings Limited

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is considering an offshore bond sale of as much as $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as the company ramps up spending on artificial intelligence. The notes could be denominated in dollars and offshore yuan, and the sale may come as early as this month, the people said. The move follows Tencent's June offering of long-dated dollar and yuan securities, which raised nearly $4.7 billion in its largest debt offering since 2020, with proceeds mainly for debt refinancing and general corporate purposes including AI products and services. Tencent has around $22 billion of offshore notes outstanding and no public bonds maturing this year, and it raised capital expenditures on AI projects and computing by 176% to 52.8 billion yuan, or $7.9 billion, in the June quarter. The potential sale adds to a global AI fundraising rush that has already topped $575 billion in 2026, according to Goldman Sachs credit strategists, and follows SoftBank Group Corp.'s $11.1 billion junk-bond offering last month. Tencent did not respond to a request for comment.

DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80B yuan, or $12B, in its latest funding round, exceeding its initial target ahead of a planned initial public offering in early 2027, Bloomberg reported. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. and Tencent Holdings have committed among the largest amounts in the current financing, which is expected to close soon, according to people familiar with the matter. DeepSeek initially sought about 50B yuan, but investor interest surged following the release of its latest AI model, and the final amount could approach 100B yuan based on signed term sheets. The company plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei Technologies' top AI accelerators at a large data center under construction in Inner Mongolia, and has released software developed with Huawei to program its AI chips. Meanwhile, rival Moonshot is also targeting an early 2027 IPO after completing a funding round that valued the company at $50B.