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Tencent's Quarterly Revenue Rises 13% on Gaming, AI Demand

FILE PHOTO: Tencent's logo is displayed at its booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Tencent's logo is displayed at its booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
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Tencent's Quarterly Revenue Rises 13% on Gaming, AI Demand

FILE PHOTO: Tencent's logo is displayed at its booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Tencent's logo is displayed at its booth at the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, China, September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo

Tencent Holdings reported a 13% increase in fourth-quarter revenue on Wednesday, driven by strong demand for gaming and growth in its artificial intelligence services, cementing its position as China's largest social media and gaming company.

The Shenzhen-based firm posted revenue of 194.4 billion yuan ($28.3 billion) for the three months to December 31, just above the 193.5 billion yuan forecast by analysts polled by LSEG.

Quarterly net profit was 58.26 billion yuan, compared with an average estimate of 57.75 billion yuan.

Tencent has been accelerating AI ⁠investments funded by ⁠its gaming arm as it competes with rivals including Alibaba and ByteDance.

The company is embedding AI across its WeChat messaging and payment app, cloud services and gaming, drawing on an ecosystem of more than one billion users.

Domestic gaming revenue rose 15% to 38.2 billion yuan, while international gaming revenue surged ⁠32% to 21.1 billion yuan. Online advertising revenue climbed 17% to 41.1 billion yuan, boosted by AI-enhanced ad targeting.

Gaming growth was driven by newer titles including "Delta Force" and "Valorant Mobile", alongside established hits "Honor of Kings" and "Peacekeeper Elite".

Revenue in its FinTech and Business Services segment, which includes cloud computing, rose 8% to 60.8 billion yuan. Tencent does not break out cloud revenue separately.

To compete with rivals such as Alibaba Group and ByteDance, Tencent ramped up AI talent acquisition, including hiring ⁠former OpenAI ⁠researcher Yao Shunyu to lead the development of its proprietary Hunyuan large language model.

It spent 1 billion yuan promoting its Yuanbao AI chatbot during the Lunar New Year holiday period to gain market share in China's increasingly crowded AI sector, Reuters reported.

This month, it launched its "OpenClaw" AI product suite, comprising QClaw for individual users, Lighthouse for developers and WorkBuddy for enterprises, as competition intensifies around AI agents - software that can perform multi-step tasks autonomously.

Capital expenditure for 2025 totaled 79.2 billion yuan, compared to 76.8 billion yuan in 2024.

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Technology

OpenAI Begins Rollout of New Powerful AI Model GPT-6 Astra

The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
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OpenAI Begins Rollout of New Powerful AI Model GPT-6 Astra

The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday it would begin rolling out its newest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to select customers, saying it had built in safeguards to mitigate security risks.

"At this level of capability, safety has to become our top priority," OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters on a call about the release of GPT-6, also known as Astra.

Just over a year has passed since OpenAI launched the previous version of its flagship model, GPT-5, said AFP.

Concerns about the capabilities of advanced models have grown since then, following incidents involving systems built by OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.

OpenAI paused some model development for two weeks this summer after two models it was testing were involved in a security breach at AI platform Hugging Face.

The San Francisco-based company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.

Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model Thursday, the company said, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.

"We are working towards getting Astra in everyone's hands as quickly as we can; I know it is frustrating and I appreciate the patience. It should be quick," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media Thursday afternoon.

In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of "tedious" computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.

To illustrate the time savings of building autonomous AI agents with Astra, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.

"It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," Brockman said on the call, referring to artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.

OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft, one of its earliest and largest investors, under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI. Those terms were scrapped in April.

- 'Limited window' -

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.

"A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended," Pachocki said on the same call.

"We also have to be willing to slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient," he added.

Altman explained in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday afternoon why the company decided to release a new model with this level of uncertainty and risk.

"The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks, and the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself... is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new cyber threats," Altman said.

In July OpenAI confirmed that it had reached one billion active users across all of its products, including both free and paid users.

OpenAI, Anthropic and more than 100 other organizations signed an open letter last week calling for a coordinated global response to AI-related cybersecurity risks, warning that the window to strengthen cyber defenses was limited.

Anthropic went further on Monday, calling for industry-wide coordination on safety and on the pace of developing increasingly capable models.

"I believe that shared safety standards and international coordination on further AI development need to be prioritized now," OpenIA's Pachocki said on Thursday.

The US state of Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, his office citing what it called the company's complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards.

It also comes as OpenAI and rival Anthropic are both racing towards becoming public companies over the next several months, though OpenAI might not hold its IPO till sometime in 2027, according to reports.

Technology

Deputy CEO of NCAI Highlights AI’s Future at DeepFest 2026

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
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Deputy CEO of NCAI Highlights AI’s Future at DeepFest 2026

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies. He explained that the current phase requires greater focus on using AI optimally and harnessing its potential to achieve tangible impact that benefits humanity and society, the Saudi Press Agency said on Friday.

His remarks came during the opening session of the fourth and final day of DeepFest 2026. He highlighted the evolving relationship between humans and AI, as well as technology's role in enhancing human capabilities and improving experiences.

Altwaijry explained that SDAIA recognized early on that a meaningful partnership between humans and AI cannot be achieved through algorithms, models, and technical concepts alone. Rather, it requires enabling individuals to experience AI’s potential firsthand.

He noted that AI has now become an integral part of today’s work environments, contributing to software development and testing, analyzing and preparing business requirements, and giving individuals greater space to focus on user experience, creativity, and exploring new ideas and solutions.

Technology

Abu Dhabi AI Institute Releases Fully Open-Source Models With Training Data, Code

A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
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Abu Dhabi AI Institute Releases Fully Open-Source Models With Training Data, Code

A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Abu Dhabi-based research institute IFM on Thursday released six artificial intelligence models together with the data and methods used to build them, challenging an industry trend toward increasingly secretive AI development.

The K2 Horizon release includes model weights, training data, code, methodologies and intermediate checkpoints, allowing researchers to retrace the models' development process and reproduce results, IFM founder Eric Xing told Reuters.

The move goes beyond the "open-weight" approach used by some Chinese developers, which make models available for download but provide limited insight into how they were built, and contrasts with the more closed development practices of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which neither release their models for download nor disclose the data and techniques behind them.

"Our goal with this release is to establish a reference point for what a truly open model release can look like," Xing said.

He said the release was also intended to show policymakers, regulators and public-interest advocates that "openness and competitive performance are not mutually exclusive."

The launch forms part of the UAE's push to establish itself as a global AI hub.

The model family ranges from one designed for smartwatches and other constrained devices to a 375-billion-parameter system for enterprise deployments.