Chinese technology giant and maker of WeChat, a super-app with 1.4bn active users. WeChat combines messaging, payments and millions of "mini-apps" that let consumers buy clothes, order food and perform other transactions.
Tencent is one of China's leading cloud providers, competing with Alibaba and Baidu. In May 2025 the company hosted a cloud-computing conference at which it cut prices and promised a major platform upgrade.
Tencent co-founded the OpenAtom Foundation alongside Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu to promote open-source software development in China.
Tencent is a major acquirer of foreign games studios and has bought stakes in hundreds of gaming, film and TV studios. In 2022 it bought Sumo Group, a video-game developer based in Sheffield, Britain. It helped bankroll the company behind "Black Myth: Wukong", the video game that captivated players on its release in 2024; the studio was founded by Feng Ji, a former Tencent executive born in the 1980s. Tencent also holds stakes in content distributors such as Bilibili and Xiaohongshu.
Tencent has begun embedding AI features such as search and image generation into WeChat, using both its own models and those of DeepSeek. It is developing "agentic" services capable of making purchases and performing other semi-autonomous actions on users' behalf. The company has acknowledged that many such services will end up looking alike; its bet is that the users and companies already plugged into WeChat will give it an edge. Tencent's investment in AI models started more slowly than rivals, but the company says that over six months in 2026 it completely revamped how its AI team works. A new model, Hy3, is in testing and is being slowly integrated with WeChat, where millions of businesses run "mini-programs" that could be woven together with AI. On May 13th 2026 Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, warned of a messy "land grab" for AI services in China.
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.