Tencent posted a strong third quarter on Thursday, delivering 15% year-on-year revenue growth as aggressive investments in artificial intelligence continued to reshape its advertising, gaming, and cloud businesses.
The Chinese tech giant said AI enhancements are already improving targeting, boosting game engagement, and accelerating internal production pipelines.
The company reported 192.9 billion Chinese yuan ($27.12 billion) in revenue for Q3 2025, beating the 189.2 billion yuan expected by analysts surveyed by LSEG. Operating profit rose to 63.6 billion yuan, also above the 58.01 billion yuan the market had forecast.
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For a company long anchored in gaming and social entertainment, Tencent’s core business remained firm. Revenue from gaming, marketing, and social media services reached 95.9 billion yuan, a 16% increase from a year earlier, underscoring the strength of both its domestic and international content pipelines.
AI-powered games drive demand at home and abroad
In China, Tencent’s domestic gaming revenue climbed 15% year-on-year, driven by the recently released titles “Delta Force” and “VALORANT MOBILE.” The latter has already become “China’s most successful mobile game launch year-to-date,” the company said.
International gaming — Tencent’s fastest-growing segment in recent quarters — surged 43% to 20.8 billion yuan. The company pointed to strong performance from “Clash Royale” and “Dying Light: The Beast,” as well as higher contributions from Supercell’s catalogue and a new acquisition that helped extend Tencent’s global footprint.
The momentum reflects the company’s broader efforts to strengthen AI-enabled game development. Tencent said improvements in its AI foundation model are now being deployed across gameplay optimization, live-ops engagement, and production design.
“Our strategic investments in AI are benefitting us in business areas such as ad targeting and game engagement, as well as in efficiency enhancement areas such as coding, and game and video production,” CEO Ma Huateng said in the earnings release.
Cloud expansion and Europe ambitions
Tencent has been pushing deeper into cloud computing as part of its strategy to challenge established global providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The company lifted capital expenditure earlier in the year to build out AI-ready data center capacity and accelerate its expansion into Europe, where regulatory pressure on U.S. tech giants has created fresh opportunities for cloud alternatives.
That strategy has had a visible payoff. The company reported higher cloud services revenue, citing increased demand for AI-related workloads as enterprises upgrade their digital infrastructure.
Tencent also noted continued improvement to HunYuan, its in-house foundational AI model. The update boosted its coding, math, and science reasoning abilities. The firm also confirmed it uses DeepSeek in some products, illustrating a hybrid model approach blending in-house and external AI technologies.
Payments and financial services lift fintech arm
The WeChat owner’s financial and business services division posted 58.2 billion yuan in revenue for the quarter, a 10% increase from a year earlier. Tencent attributed the rise to stronger commercial payments activity, higher consumer spending, and growth in digital loan services.
The company recently launched TenPay Global Checkout, a cross-border payment platform allowing selected Weixin merchants to receive funds from outside the Chinese mainland. The move expands Tencent’s reach in international e-commerce at a time when Chinese consumer platforms are increasingly seeking offshore payment channels.
Capex slows after heavy AI build-out
After front-loading spending earlier in the year to strengthen its AI and cloud capabilities, Tencent’s capital expenditures eased to 13 billion yuan in the third quarter. The company’s capex is heavily concentrated in IT infrastructure, including data centers, high-performance computing clusters, and AI training hardware.
The slowdown signals that Tencent is entering a phase of absorbing the infrastructure it built — even as demand for AI inference and cloud services continues to climb.
Stock surges nearly 57% this year
Tencent shares are up 56.7% year-to-date, a rally fueled by its resurgence in gaming, improvements in macro sentiment around China’s tech sector, and investor confidence in the company’s ability to commercialize its AI pipeline.
The Q3 numbers reinforce that pivot. Tencent’s ability to capture AI-driven efficiency gains while pushing deeper into cloud computing and global gaming places it among the few Chinese tech giants showing consistent, broad-based growth amid a challenging regulatory and economic backdrop.
With HunYuan gaining new capabilities, gaming hits rolling out on schedule, and European cloud expansion underway, Tencent’s Q3 report signals an AI-powered business that is scaling across nearly every major revenue line — and still gathering momentum.