Plans to build models instead because it thinks selling tokens will prove more lucrative in the long term
Chinese tech giant Tencent has turned its back on instant profits, betting that a new business unit that creates its own AI and embeds that in its products will pay off to a greater extent than cashing in on demand for computing resources.During the company’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu asked when Tencent expects to see a return on investment from the $53 billion capital expenditure it made in the quarter.Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell said demand for compute resources is so strong that Tencent could recover its depreciation costs “almost immediately” if it rented its infrastructure.
Company president Martin Lau said if Tencent behaved like a neocloud it would “achieve a decent return in an immediate timeframe” as the company has offers for its compute capacity “at more than 30 percent profit compared to the price that we paid just a few months ago.”
Lau said Tencent is instead “playing a different game or executing a larger strategy in that we are allocating a very substantial proportion of the new compute to building our own models to state-of-the-art status, and also to deploying, popularizing, and bringing our own AI applications to market leadership in China.”He said Tencent believes that if Tencent can provide “superior intelligence that we can achieve through state-of-the-art models, through market-leading AI applications … we can then convert into superior economic returns over the longer term.”
