Chip bans? LOL! Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough GPUs for future AI model training

Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough high-end GPUs to train new AI models for years, in part because it’s found more efficient ways to do so.

Speaking on the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call, company president Martin Lau said Tencent has “a pretty strong stockpile of chips that we acquired previously”.

The company will use some “for the applications that will generate immediate returns for us” – mostly advertising and content recommendation.

We have enough high-end chips to continue training models for a few more generations

Tencent will use others to train more large language models using techniques that mean it won’t need to acquire more silicon.

“Over the past few months, we start to move off the concept or the belief of the American tech companies, which they call the scaling law, which required continuous expansion of the training cluster,” Lau told investors. “And now ...