Tencent's capex is rapidly declining due to its inability to buy as many GPUs as it wants.

During the Chinese technology conglomerate's recent Q3 2025 earnings call, senior executives noted that its capex was falling due to “a change in terms of AI chip availability” and “supply chain constraints sourcing GPUs.”

The company's quarterly capex was just RMB13.0 billion ($1.83bn), down 24 percent Year-on-Year (YoY) and less than Q2's $2.49bn. The company expects this to further fall in 2026.

In comparison, cloud hyperscalers Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services reported capex of $34.9bn, $24bn, and $34.2bn, respectively. All three are seeing capex rise dramatically as they invest in AI infrastructure.

According to Tencent, the company has enough GPUs for its operations, but is experiencing "limited impact" on its cloud revenue due to not having enough to offer to clients, while US competitors are seeing consistent double-digit quarterly growth at least partly propped up by AI offerings.

Tencent's execs further noted they plan to work on improved models to power AI offerings, a workaround for the hardware limitations. During the previous quarter's earnings call, Tencent president Martin Lau said that the company does not need more GPUs for AI training and model upgrades. In a similar vein to the recent announcement that they will work on their models for efficiency, Lau said: "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."

Limitations on access to GPUs for Chinese companies have been long-standing, with US President Donald Trump saying earlier this month: “The most advanced [chips], we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” adding: “We will let [China] deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced.”

Some chips are available to Chinese customers, though Nvidia and AMD had to agree to pay the US government 15 percent of the revenue generated from the sale of their H20 and MI380 chips as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the semiconductors.

Tencent doesn't share its earnings by business segment, but the company as a whole is seeing growth. Total revenues for the quarter were RMB192.9 billion ($27.12bn), up 15 percent YoY.