Tencent Holdings is aiming for “aggressive” growth in the international cloud computing market, on the back of the growing appetite overseas for Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to a senior executive.
Advertisement
That sharpened focus by Tencent stems from how its overseas cloud operations have been expanding “the fastest among all [its business] segments”, with “high double-digit growth over the past few years”, said senior executive vice-president Dowson Tong Tao-sang, who serves as CEO of the Shenzhen-based firm’s Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG), in an interview with the Post on Thursday.
AI was a major driver for that growth, according to Tong. “There’s a lot of opportunities” to bring Chinese open-source AI models to overseas clients, he added.
“Many of these AI-powered apps are growing very fast, so we definitely have very aggressive growth targets and we have been on track.”
Targeting AI opportunities beyond China reflected Tencent’s efforts to keep pace with rapid developments in the field, where competition has intensified among innovative start-ups like DeepSeek and internet peers Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu and ByteDance. Alibaba owns the Post.
Advertisement
“[In] some of the markets we’re looking at, they want to host large language models within their own region,” Tong said. “We have a lot of tools to help them leverage open-source models, based on our expertise and experience in implementing products around AI.”