Tencent makes great strides in chips, cloud

China's tech giant Tencent Holdings (0700) touted progress in semiconductor chip development and investment yesterday, offering a rare public glimpse of its R&D initiatives.

Best known for computer games and social media app WeChat, Tencent has been steadily investing in research and development of semiconductors, along with other Chinese tech firms.

"Facing scenarios with strong business needs, Tencent has had a long-term plan and investment for chip R&D," said company official Tang Daosheng, according to a post on the WeChat account for Tencent Cloud.

Tang, a senior executive vice president and chief executive of Tencent's cloud and smart industry group, flagged advances in three directions at a company event. He highlighted three chips developed by Tencent. These are a chip for AI computing called Zixiao, another for video processing, known as Canghai, and a chip for high-performance networks that is designated Xuanling.

The company also announced its Orca cloud operating system.

The comments come after Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (9988), a Tencent competitor in China's market for cloud computing, unveiled a new server chip for data centres last month.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (1810) unveiled its Surge 1 chip for image processing in phone cameras this year.

These efforts dovetail with China's push to boost the domestic semiconductor industry, which has become a key point of tension between Washington and Beijing.

Separately, ByteDance's billionaire founder Zhang Yiming has stepped down as chairman, months after resigning as chief executive officer of the TikTok owner that's seeking to reposition itself amid China's crackdown on its internet industry.

New chief executive Liang Rubo has replaced Zhang on the five-member board that also includes representatives from investors Susquehanna International Group and Sequoia Capital China. Zhang, 38, will still be involved in formulating the Chinese tech firm's longer-term strategy.

The world's most valuable startup is making a bigger push into enterprise software after Beijing's crackdown and this week announced it was restructuring into six business units.