Tencent Holdings said its cloud unit's active overseas customer base doubled over the past year and that its international AI business grew by triple digits as the Shenzhen-based group sells more of its business software abroad.

The figures, released at the company's 2026 Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on Oct. 29, are Tencent's own and have not been independently audited. They came without revenue numbers or a base figure, so investors cannot yet size the overseas business against Tencent's domestic cloud operations. For Asia, the detail that matters is where the growth is landing. Tencent named telecom operators in Indonesia, a retailer in Thailand and a bank and a consumer brand in Hong Kong among its customers or prospective partners, and it has added data center capacity across the region this year.

Dowson Tong, senior executive vice president of Tencent and chief executive of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said AI's “real value comes when it can be applied to everyday operations” at scale.

WorkBuddy and Hy4 lead Tencent's enterprise AI pitch

The product at the center of the push is WorkBuddy, an AI office agent that carries out tasks inside messaging apps and company systems. Tencent said it has handled more than 9 billion task requests since launching in March, is used in more than 50 industries and has been adopted by half of China's top 500 enterprises. Its ecosystem now includes more than 50,000 developers and partners and over 200,000 "skills," the add-on functions that let the agent perform specific jobs.

Tencent is now selling WorkBuddy to international companies and has released several related tools outside China, including its CodeBuddy coding assistant and its Agent Development Platform. Customers can pick which AI model runs each task. At home, it introduced Buddy One, a system that lets WorkBuddy coordinate work across Tencent's office apps.

The company also said the general release of its Hy4 model is coming soon, along with Hy4 Flash, a cheaper version. Tong said the full model will improve on the preview released in August for long, multi-step productivity work and will add visual understanding, according to TechNode. The Hy4 preview has 770 billion total parameters, with 49 billion active during inference, and a context window of 1 million tokens, TechNode reported. Tencent did not give a release date.

Enterprises can reach Tencent's Hy models and third-party models through TokenHub, a single platform for billing and access control. Tencent is also an investor in rival model developer DeepSeek, which is nearing a funding round of about 100 billion yuan.

Southeast Asia deals and new data center capacity

Tencent Cloud now serves customers in more than 150 countries and regions, the company said, and nine of every 10 Chinese internet companies expanding abroad use it.

In Indonesia, it helped XLSMART move more than 1,000 microservices onto its platform and is exploring wider cloud and AI work with Telkomsel and Indosat. In Thailand, retailer CP AXTRA is using Tencent Cloud to modernize supply chain and finance systems. Tencent also announced a partnership with Central Retail Digital to explore AI agents for retail. Its business in Hong Kong and Macao, where customers include Hung Fook Tong and Fusion Bank, has grown for seven straight years, the company said.

Elsewhere in Asia, customers in Japan and South Korea include Kakao and Com2uS. Tencent also announced partnerships in the Middle East with Alsaif Gallery, Hoolive, OmniOps and TruKKer.

To handle the demand, Tencent said it added infrastructure capacity this year in Frankfurt, Osaka, Riyadh, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand, bringing its network to 25 cloud regions and 70 availability zones. In August it announced plans for its first Malaysian cloud region, in Johor, starting with three availability zones, TechNode reported. The company said it will expand further across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas over the next year.

Visa pact extends Weixin Pay's cross-border reach

On the same day, at the summit, Tencent and Visa signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on cross-border payments, AI-driven commerce and support for companies expanding abroad.

Under the framework, the two will develop ways for travelers to and from China to pay at merchants on the Weixin Pay and Visa networks through TenPay Global, Tencent's cross-border payment platform, and Visa Pay, subject to regulatory requirements. They also plan to use Visa Direct to make it easier for overseas senders to transfer money into the Weixin Pay system. The companies will look at "agentic" payments, in which AI agents help users find and buy goods, using Visa Intelligent Commerce. Tencent said its Midas payments platform, which already works with Visa on gaming, will extend that cooperation to Tencent's overseas AI businesses.

The memorandum sets out areas to explore rather than binding terms, and the companies did not disclose financial commitments, The Edge Malaysia reported. The two have worked together since 2019, starting in gaming payments through Midas, the outlet said.

Tencent is putting the payment tools in front of foreign visitors at home as well. On Nov. 2 it said it had been named a strategic partner of the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Shenzhen, the city where the company was founded. Visitors can pay at Weixin Pay merchants with international bank cards linked to WeChat or with more than 60 overseas e-wallets supported by TenPay Global, or through TenPayGo, an app for short-term visitors. Tencent is also building an AI platform for the meeting's news center with Shenzhen Media Group, based on WorkBuddy's enterprise edition.

The next numbers that could show whether the overseas push is moving Tencent's revenue will come with its third-quarter results. Until then, the company's own, unaudited measure of progress is a customer count, not a sales figure.