On March 21, Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent Group, was interviewed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He said Tencent's investment in the Middle East is still in its early stages but is expected to grow rapidly. "We see huge potential in this market and will therefore increase investment," he said. He also said that there will be more news about Tencent's investment in the Middle East this year.
Tang Daosheng mentioned that "AI is a hot word in this region." Tencent Cloud is increasing the output of AI models so that various products can continue to be moved to the cloud. In fact, the output of large models is not only the accumulation of computing power, but also the ability to integrate large models, how to productize them, and how to solve their applications in actual scenarios. Tencent Cloud has taken the first step. In Tencent's product system, SaaS products such as VooV Meeting and Tencent Qidian have become early products for large-scale cloud migration due to their high user stickiness. Take Tencent Qidian as an example. It is a key product in the practice of Tencent AI large-scale models and other technologies. It promotes large models to ordinary users through enterprise applications. At present, Tencent Qidian has covered more than 80 industries such as finance, retail, and travel, provided services to more than 1 million companies, and connected 350 million users. The sales growth rate in the field of medium and large customers exceeded 100% year-on-year.
Since 2016, Tencent Cloud has begun to enter the international market, with Southeast Asia as its main target market. After several years of development, Tencent Cloud provides more than 400 technology and connection solutions through a global infrastructure network to support enterprises in achieving digital transformation. Its services cover 26 regions and 70 availability zones on five continents, with more than 2,800 acceleration nodes. As of the first half of 2023, Tencent Cloud's international business has maintained double-digit growth as a whole, especially in Europe, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East. At present, Tencent Cloud's business covers Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and provides solutions for various industries such as the Internet, games, finance, cultural tourism, automobiles, and retail.
For business expansion in the Middle East, Tencent plans to first provide cloud storage services to entertainment and gaming companies and actively invest in the field of AI. Currently, Tencent has begun to provide data centers for training artificial intelligence models to some customers.