Tencent Holdings reported on Wednesday (12) that it recorded revenue of 204.8 billion yuan in the 2nd quarter of 2026, with the financial and business services division totaling 60.3 billion yuan, up 9% year over year. On the earnings call, Chairman and CEO Pony Ma presented a three-layer artificial intelligence (AI) strategy — intelligence, applications, and infrastructure.
Three-layer AI strategy
In the intelligence layer, the recently launched Hunyuan Hy3 model has been integrated into Yuanbao and made available globally via API and in the international version of WorkBuddy. Tencent plans to launch Hy4 soon.
In the applications layer, the company highlighted WorkBuddy, a native-AI office agent that has seen rapid user growth and retention on iOS, Windows, Android, and HarmonyOS. The company says the product is the Chinese leader among native-AI office agents, citing engineering capability, model selection, and a skills library. The portfolio was expanded into a matrix with Marvis and QClaw, and CodeBuddy also saw user growth.
Infrastructure and investment
In infrastructure, Tencent significantly increased its purchase of computing capacity to convert usage of models and applications into revenue. Chief strategy officer James Mitchell said that, given demand and rising rental prices, the company could almost immediately recover depreciation costs by renting to third parties, but chose to direct most of the new computing to training cutting-edge models and operating its own AI applications.
President Martin Lau said that AI-related capital expenditures (capex) are an initial investment for model training, future inference demand, and Tencent Cloud's AI capacity. Lau said that computing capacity ordered or paid for months ago can already be resold at a margin of more than 30% over the original price, a sign of the shift in the economics of computing for AI.
Asked whether WorkBuddy is enterprise software or a new platform, Lau said it is a new platform, a flexible space for AI agents focused on productivity needs and one-person businesses, with an integration layer that uses different models and a growing library of third-party skills. The Hy model will be one of WorkBuddy's options, the main one if it solves problems cost-effectively, but not the only one.
Management described the quarter as the beginning of an AI-powered Tencent, with growth in marketing services, new games performing well, and a rapid rise in video views on WeChat Channels.
