Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate Tencent Holdings' president, Martin Lau, said that the company does not need more GPUs for AI training and model upgrades during the company's recent Q2 2025 earnings call.

When asked about how ongoing discussions between the US and China regarding the importing of AI chips into China would impact Tencent, Lau told analysts: "We don't really have a definitive answer on the import situation yet. I think there is a lot of discussion between the two governments and [we are] waiting to see what comes out from that.

"But from our own perspective, we have enough chips for training and the continuous upgrade of our existing models, and we also have many options for inference chips."

As highlighted by a report from The Register, Lau added that new inference chips may also not be necessary. "We are executing a lot of software improvements in order to drive efficiency in inference so we can put more workloads on the same number of chips."

The US has long been limiting the sale of chips to Chinese companies. Earlier this month, it was revealed that Nvidia and AMD had agreed to pay the US government 15 percent of their China chip sales to obtain export licenses for the Nvidia H20 and AMD MI380 chips.

China has since urged firms against purchasing the chips, citing "security concerns."

Tencent has been less aggressive with its GPU strategy than its competitors. In March 2025, the company explained that it had restrategized and focused on getting more out of its GPUs, following the January 2025 claims from DeepSeek that it had managed to train a Large Language Model, performant at a level comparable with those developed by OpenAI and Meta, but with less advanced chips and cheaper.

Despite this, operating capex for the quarter was RMB 17.9 billion ($2.49bn), an increase of 149 percent year-over-year (YoY), and driven by "increased investments in GPUs and servers to ramp up our AI capabilities," said CFO John Lo. Total capex was RMB 19.1 billion.

Throughout 2024, Tencent's capex reached $10.6bn, more than triple the year prior. In the company's Q4 2024 earnings call, it said it expected 2025's capex to be in the low teens percent of revenue.

Lau added regarding capex that the company had not revised its full-year capex target yet, expanding: "I would say the depreciation cost related to AI will definitely continue to go up. But at the same time, we also see that we continue to reap the benefits of AI. And the issue is that these two may not match each other completely, but I think both of them will be moving in the same general direction."

Tencent does not share financial results specifically for the company's cloud services offering. Total revenue for Q2 2025 across the company was RMB 184.5bn ($25.7bn), up 15 percent YoY, and gross profit was RMB 105bn ($14.62bn), up 22 percent YoY.

During the earnings call, it was noted that cloud services revenue growth had accelerated versus recent quarters, benefiting from "increased revenue from providing GPUs and API tokens for customers' AI needs."