China’s Tencent Plans to Invest $69.9 Billion Next Five Years into Developing New Technologies Including Quantum Computing, AI, Blockchain, IoT, & 5G
(AI.Daily.co.uk) Chinese technology firm Tencent, best known as being the developer of WeChat, plans to invest $69.9bn (500 billion yuan) into developing new technology and infrastructure. This will be done over a period of five years (so around $14bn a year) and will be spent on things like: quantum computing, cloud, artificial intelligence, block-chain, huge million-server data centres, super-computing centres, Internet of Things operating systems, and 5G networks.
Their strategy so far to raise capital for this endeavour is issuing bonds. So far Tencent has issued $12 billion in bonds so far with plans for $20 billion more. This investment may have been inspired by the companies rival Alibaba which is planning to spend $28bn over three years on cloud, AI, and semiconductors. According to research by Canalys, Alibabai owns around 46% cloud market share in China while Tencent only has 18% market share.