Chinese tech company Tencent is a gaming giant and the parent company of WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app in China.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Tencent has spent years evolving into a gaming and social media giant in China and in the process, has built up its cloud computing capabilities.
The technology firm is now looking to bring that expertise to Europe as it ramps up expansion of its cloud business overseas, Dowson Tong, CEO of Tencent’s cloud group told CNBC.
“We have strengths and competence in very specific technology areas, as well as industry verticals,” Tong said in an interview last week. “These are are very unique technology capabilities that have been developed over many years [and] started from our products in China.”
“So we intend to bring a lot of this technology expertise to Europe. We’re talking to a lot of interested potential customers.”
Tencent’s European push will pitch it against U.S. hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google, which collectively make up 70% share of Europe’s cloud market.
But the Chinese firm is hoping to focus on specific areas where it has built up capabilities to differentiate from rivals.
Tong said these include cloud technologies for areas like optimizing video streaming, ensuring a smooth gaming experience, and developing and hosting so-called “super apps” like WeChat — China’s biggest messaging service. WeChat is often seen as the pioneer of super apps, a term that refers to an application with multiple functions, such as messaging and payments.
Tong gave an example of Tencent’s cloud computing work with French telecommunications firm Orange in supporting the company’s Max it app in Africa. In the area of gaming, Tencent’s cloud technology can improve “latency,” which is a technical term for the lag between a player’s actions and what happens on screen, Tong said.
The Chinese company is also betting on European companies opting for multiple cloud providers for services, instead of relying on one or two of the big players.
“I would say that’s actually a … deliberate strategy of ours to make the customers feel more comfortable using our technology, especially in a multi-cloud environment,” he said, adding that customers want to be able to interoperate.
AI push
Cloud computing companies have put an increased focus on selling artificial intelligence tools as a way to boost revenue and differentiate their offerings from rivals.
Tencent has built up its own artificial intelligence foundational model in China called Hunyuan. But it also uses some models created by Chinese firm DeepSeek in its products.
Tong said Tencent would take a similar approach in Europe when it comes to AI, potentially offering products built on European models.
“Our focus would be providing tools that would work with different foundation models and ultimately, it’s the customer’s decision which model works best for them,” Tong told CNBC.
“So I think at the end of the day, we would always go to our customers, find the problems they wanted addressed, provide them tools so that they can accomplish what they need, and realise the cost efficiency that we can offer.”
For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trumpplans toextend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.
Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.
Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.
Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report
Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.
Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.
Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.
At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.
AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.
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Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.
“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.
The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.
“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.
With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.
And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.
The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.
The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.
JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.
“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.
“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.
Deposit token vs. stablecoin
JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.
A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.
Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.
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JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.
JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.
Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.
The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.
Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.