Tencent on Wednesday posted a fourth-quarter beat on top and bottom line driven by a surge in gaming and advertising revenue.

Here’s how Tencent did in the fourth quarter of 2024 versus Refinitiv estimates:

• Revenue: 172.4 billion Chinese yuan ($23.9 billion), versus 168.9 billion yuan expected.
• Profit attributable to equity holders of the company: 51.3 billion yuan, compared with 46.03 billion yuan expected.

Revenue rose 11% year-on-year while profit was up 90% versus the same period in 2023.

Tencent is known as one of the world’s biggest gaming firms. Domestic games revenue in China rose 23% year-on-year to 33.2 billion yuan in the fourth quarter. Tencent said this hike was due to a low base in the prior year’s period, as well as growth in some of its hit games, including Honour of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite.

The annual growth rate for domestic games accelerated in the December quarter, compared with the previous three-month period.

International games revenue jumped 15% year-on-year to 16 billion. Over the past few years, Tencent has stepped up efforts overseas with games like PUBG Mobile, as the domestic games market slowed amid macroeconomic and regulatory headwinds.

While Tencent is one of the world’s biggest gaming companies, the tech giant has also placed a large focus on becoming a key artificial intelligence player in China over the last two years, putting out various AI models.

On Tuesday, the company launched its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model which can turn text or images into 3D graphics. In February, Tencent had unveiled Turbo S, an AI model designed to answer user queries as quickly as possible.

Investors are still watching as to how Tencent plans to monetize its AI investments.

The Shenzhen-headquartered firm’s AI push is emblematic of the current state of competition among China’s tech giants, which has been spurred on by startup DeepSeek and its highly efficient artificial intelligence model that was released earlier this year.

AI updates have been released thick and fast from companies including Alibaba and Baidu.

Last week, Alibaba launched a new version of its AI assistant app that will be powered by its own Qwen AI reasoning model. Baidu on Sunday released two new models including a new reasoning model.

Tencent is working with its own AI models as well as those of rivals. The company has its in-house AI chatbot called Yuanbao, which is based on its own Hunyuan foundational model as well as DeepSeek’s R1. Tencent has also sought to integrate DeepSeek’s technology across some of its other products, including WeChat’s search features in China.

This breaking news story is being updated.

Seven months ago, Alphabet lost a marquee case against the Biden administration’s Justice Department, which accused the company of maintaining an illegal monopoly in search. Weeks earlier, Google’s pursuit of cybersecurity vendor Wiz, in what would have been its largest deal ever, fizzled in part because of antitrust concerns.

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Alphabet is back on the offensive.

Alphabet on Tuesday agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, almost $10 billion more than the proposed price in mid-2024, and said it expects the deal to close next year, subject to regulatory approvals.

Wiz will sit in Google’s cloud division, which is far from the company’s dominant search business. Google is behind Amazon and Microsoft in cloud infrastructure, a standing that would make the regulatory case against a tie-up challenging for any administration.

The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan was notoriously prickly with respect to tech deals, aggressively scuttling transactions in ways that frustrated even notable Democrat supporters like Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban. Google’s pursuit of Wiz may be the first big test for new FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, as the tech industry gauges how Trump 2.0 will treat the industry that houses the six biggest U.S. companies by market value.

“It’s going to be a great litmus test and bellwether for M&A in 2025,” said Brad Haller, senior partner for mergers and acquisitions at consulting firm West Monroe. “This happening relatively early on this year means it can be used as a measuring stick.”

As a venture-backed company, the deal would be a major windfall for Silicon Valley venture capital firms, which have struggled to generate returns since the initial public offering market mostly shut down in early 2022 and large M&A went dormant. After peaking at $780 billion in 2021, VC exit value plummeted to $89.2 billion the following year and to $71.6 billion in 2023, according to an October report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. In the third quarter of 2024, the number hit a five-quarter low.

“Large acquisition strategy is back on the menu for VC-backed companies,” Haller said.

Index Ventures is the largest outside investor in Wiz, followed by firms including Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and Cyberstarts.

In walking away from a deal with Google in July, Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport wrote in a memo to employees that the company would instead pursue an IPO. There are some signs that the IPO market is heating up, as artificial intelligence infrastructure company CoreWeave, digital health startup Hinge Health and buy now, pay later lender Klarna have all filed prospectuses recently with the SEC.

Economic uncertainty represents the biggest headwind, as President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on top trading partners like China, Mexico and Canada, as well as massive cuts in government spending, have led to extreme market volatility and raised concerns about business and consumer confidence. The Nasdaq is on pace for its fifth straight weekly drop and worst quarterly performance since 2022.

For Google, the allure of acquiring Wiz appears to be worth the potential regulatory risk. Reuters reported, citing a source, that Wiz agreed to a termination fee of over $3.2 billion, which the publication called “one of the highest fees in M&A history.”

Google declined to comment.

Founded in 2020 Wiz hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after just 18 months. The company’s cloud security products include prevention, active detection and response, and they’ve become increasingly essential as rapid advancements in AI have made attacks more sophisticated and potentially more damaging.

“That price tag tells us that Google was almost desperate to boost its security bona fides before the adoption of AI gathers even more speed,” Gordon Haskett analysts wrote in a Tuesday note.

Google said in a statement on Tuesday announcing the deal that, “The increased role of AI, and adoption of cloud services, have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers, making cybersecurity increasingly important in defending against emergent risks and protecting national security.”

In Wiz’s blog post, Rappaport said that, “Becoming part of Google Cloud is effectively strapping a rocket to our backs.”

The deal will face regulatory scrutiny, but “Google, in our view, would have a stronger case compared to consumer-focused acquisitions,” analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note after the announcement. The firm said Google has less than 15% of the cloud services market.

Google’s biggest acquisition during the Biden presidency was its $5.4 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Mandiant. The search giant wasn’t the only Big Tech company feeling the regulatory heat.

For Microsoft to eventually close its $69 billion acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard in late 2023, the company had to endure a 21-month battle with regulators, including an injunction effort by the FTC. The agency also sued to block Meta’s acquisition of virtual reality company Within, though a California district court scuttled the FTC’s efforts.

Beyond dealmaking challenges, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been accused of monopolistic practices by either the Justice Department or the FTC. In Google’s case, both agencies pursued actions.

Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in January that she hoped the incoming Trump administration wouldn’t let Amazon and Meta off the hook from pending antitrust suits with a “sweetheart deal.” Her comments came after numerous tech execs and companies, including Google, pledged money towards Trump’s inauguration fund.

Ferguson has suggested that his FTC will keep a keen eye on tech, though he hasn’t offered much by way of specifics. During Trump’s first administration, the president had a particularly hostile relationship with the industry, routinely slamming Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, notably for his ownership of The Washington Post, as well as taking aim at Meta and Google for their alleged biases towards his administration.

Those former foes have made extra efforts to change the tone this time around, whether that means ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs or trekking to Washington for Trump’s inauguration after previously making visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

In an interview on “Squawk Box” last week, Ferguson said “Big Tech is one of the main priorities” of the administration.

“President Trump appointed me to protect Americans in the marketplace,” Ferguson said. “And I’ve said since day one, Big Tech is one of our main priorities, and that remains true.”

Jonathan Kanter, former assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division under Biden, said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Tuesday that a hefty regulatory review is likely on the way for the Google-Wiz deal. He said it’s not just about Google’s position in cloud, but also the amount of data the company controls.

“I don’t think the Wiz deal is going to ease on down the road to quick approval,” said Kanter, who is now a CNBC contributor. “It’s going to be a long road. They’re going to have to look at a lot of documents, a lot of data and understand whether it’s really going to entrench Google’s market power in a lot of different markets.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson

Nvidia announced new chips for building and deploying artificial intelligence models at its annual GTC conference on Tuesday. 

CEO Jensen Huang revealed Blackwell Ultra, a family of chips shipping in the second half of this year, as well as Vera Rubin, the company’s next-generation graphics processing unit, or GPU, that is expected to ship in 2026.

Nvidia’s sales are up more than sixfold since its business was transformed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. That’s because its “big GPUs” have most of the market for developing advanced AI, a process called training.

Software developers and investors are closely watching the company’s new chips to see if they offer enough additional performance and efficiency to convince the company’s biggest end customers — cloud companies including Microsoft, Google and Amazon — to continue spending billions of dollars to build data centers based around Nvidia chips.

“This last year is where almost the entire world got involved. The computational requirement, the scaling law of AI, is more resilient, and in fact, is hyper-accelerated,” Huang said.

Tuesday’s announcements are also a test of Nvidia’s new annual release cadence. The company is striving to announce new chip families on an every-year basis. Before the AI boom, Nvidia released new chip architectures every other year. 

The GTC conference in San Jose, California, is also a show of strength for Nvidia. 

The event, Nvidia’s second in-person conference since the pandemic, is expected to have 25,000 attendees and hundreds of companies discussing the ways they use the company’s hardware for AI. That includes Waymo, Microsoft and Ford, among others. General Motors also announced that it will use Nvidia’s service for its next-generation vehicles.

The chip architecture after Rubin will be named after physicist Richard Feynman, Nvidia said on Tuesday, continuing its tradition of naming chip families after scientists. Nvidia’s Feynman chips are expected to be available in 2028, according to a slide displayed by Huang.

Nvidia will also showcase its other products and services at the event. 

For example, Nvidia announced new laptops and desktops using its chips, including two AI-focused PCs called DGX Spark and DGX Station that will be able to run large AI models such as Llama or DeepSeek. The company also announced updates to its networking parts for tying hundreds or thousands of GPUs together so they work as one, as well as a software package called Dynamo that helps users get the most out of their chips.

The system has two main components: a CPU, called Vera, and a new GPU design, called Rubin. It’s named after astronomer Vera Rubin.

Vera is Nvidia’s first custom CPU design, the company said, and it’s based on a core design they’ve named Olympus. 

Previously when it needed CPUs, Nvidia used an off-the-shelf design from Arm. Companies that have developed custom Arm core designs, such as Qualcomm and Apple, say that they can be more tailored and unlock better performance.

The custom Vera design will be twice as fast as the CPU used in last year’s Grace Blackwell chips, the company said. 

When paired with Vera, Rubin can manage 50 petaflops while doing inference, more than double the 20 petaflops for the company’s current Blackwell chips. Rubin can also support as much as 288 gigabytes of fast memory, which is one of the core specs that AI developers watch.

Nvidia is also making a change to what it calls a GPU. Rubin is actually two GPUs, Nvidia said. 

The Blackwell GPU, which is currently on the market, is actually two separate chips that were assembled together and made to work as one chip.

Starting with Rubin, Nvidia will say that when it combines two or more dies to make a single chip, it will refer to them as separate GPUs. In the second half of 2027, Nvidia plans to release a “Rubin Next” chip that combines four dies to make a single chip, doubling the speed of Rubin, and it will refer to that as four GPUs.

Nvidia said that will come in a rack called Vera Rubin NVL144. Previous versions of Nvidia’s rack were called NVL72.

WATCH: Nvidia kicks off its GTC Conference: The Committee debate how to trade it