Chinese Big Tech Accelerates AI Investments Amid U.S. Slowdown Discourse

Chinese big tech firms are accelerating AI spending and hardware access even as some public debate in the U.S. focuses on an “AI slowdown.” Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance-backed efforts are aimed at narrowing the gap with U.S. competitors through more advanced AI chips and computing capacity. On October 2, Tencent signed a U.S. cloud-data center lease with Oracle worth $7 billion for five years, reportedly paying 30% upfront, to obtain about 100,000 advanced AI chips it cannot secure in China. Tencent plans to boost its Hunyuan model and develop self-operating AI agents, while doubling AI-related spending this year. Alibaba is investing at least 380 billion yuan over three years, unveiling the Zhenwu V900 chip and a planned 5–10 trillion-parameter model.