Chinese tech giant Tencent plans to boost its spending on AI over the next 12 months, more than double what it invested over the past year.
The Shenzhen-based company, which owns the extraordinarily successful WeChat (or Weixin) app and is also a big player in online gaming and cloud services, confirmed the big hike in an earnings call on the company’s financial results for 2025 fiscal.
With total revenues up 14% year over year from 2024 to $109.4 billion, and gross profits reaching $61.5 billion, Tencent has deep enough reserves to fund the new investment.
“Our highly resilient and cash generative core businesses provide us with the resources to fund our increasing investments in AI, including recruiting top-tier AI talent and upgrading our AI infrastructure,” chairman and CEO Ma Huateng said in a statement.
On the call, president Martin Lau went into more detail, explaining that the company had spent significantly in 2024 and 2025 on its two biggest new AI products HunYuan, Tencent’s family of foundation models and Yuanbao, an AI assistant and chatbot.
“We expect to more than double these investments in HunYuan, Yuanbao, and other new AI products in 2026, which we intend to fund from increasing earnings from our core businesses,” Lau said.
Lau went on to clarify how this strategy would work on the balance sheet. “In this transformational period, we are breaking out our investment in new AI products because we view these strategic investments conceptually similar to investment in an affiliate or to capex,” he explained. “These are upfront investments required to build the necessary foundation to unlock new value as opposed to ongoing operating expenses.”
Among these new AI products is an agent service based on OpenClaw that will be able to execute tasks within WeChat on behalf of users, who now number more than 1.4 billion.
Given that the rise of OpenClaw has been accompanied by some serious security concerns, Lau detailed how this might work. “We’re building AI agents which autonomously interact on behalf of users within Weixin functionalities, especially Mini Programs,” he continued. The app has hundreds of thousands of embedded Mini Programs, covering functions such as shopping, food delivery and others.
“The excitement around OpenClaw illustrates that people recognize AI can unlock computer use capabilities to improve their daily lives but also illustrate[s] the risks around unleashing unsupervised AI. We want AI agents in Weixin to deliver AI productivity that’s beneficial to the general public as well as early adopters, and which will boost ecosystem activity and naturally generate revenue.”
The vendor did not provide a timeline for these agents.
