Tencent rents chips in Southeast Asia| Qualcomm buys Huawei patents | DeepSeek adds Claude Code support

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Bottom Line Up Front

Tencent reportedly signed a five-year, $7 billion deal to use about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, mainly to train and run its Hunyuan AI model, circumventing traditional export controls. Huawei and Qualcomm signed a cross-license that Huawei says is the pair's first covering 5G patents, and under the deal Qualcomm will buy some of Huawei's U.S. patents. Huawei executive Richard Yu said that logic folding, a design that stacks circuit layers, lifts AI performance on the Kirin 9050 phone chip's by 140%. DeepSeek released a test version of Harness with an experimental layer for running the extensions Anthropic launched days earlier for Claude Code.

Tencent signed a five-year, $7 billion deal to use about 100,000 advanced AI chips in Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, according to a Huxiu column by Zhang Zhi. Because of export controls, the chips stay offshore and Tencent reaches them remotely as a cloud service, mainly to train and run its Hunyuan AI model. That leaves the work dependent on a U.S. company's capacity and on U.S. rules about remote access. The column cites a 2026 U.S. rule barring companies ultimately controlled by Chinese entities from leasing advanced training chips anywhere. A House-passed bill would put remote access under export controls. Tencent management has said it can rent out unused capacity through Tencent Cloud.

Read at Huxiu ↗

Chipmaker Qualcomm to buy some Huawei U.S. patents in first 5G cross-license

Huawei and U.S. phone chip designer Qualcomm signed a long-term deal cross-licensing their patents in 5G, computing, AI and networking, which Huawei calls the pair's first covering 5G. A cross-license lets each company use the other's patented inventions, and every phone and base station built to the 5G standard relies on such patents. U.S. trade restrictions have limited Huawei's purchases of advanced chips and key software since 2019. The deal has Qualcomm buying some of Huawei's U.S. patents, and the companies said the transaction will close only after it receives the necessary regulatory approvals. Huawei said the deal will lift the cumulative value of its patent license agreements past $6.9 billion.

Read at IT Home ↗

Huawei says stacked circuit design raises its new phone chip's AI performance 140%

Huawei executive Richard Yu said in a video that logic folding lifts AI performance of the Kirin 9050 phone chip by 140%, adding chip-level figures to the Mate 90 launch CTD reported October 1st. Chips have long gained speed mainly by shrinking transistors, so logic folding, which shortens signal paths by stacking circuit layers, offers Huawei a separate route to speed. The 140% gain is in the chip's neural processing unit, the circuit block that runs AI tasks. Yu put the other gains at 23% for the central processor's multi-core performance and 40% for graphics rendering, all three figures Huawei's own.

Read at Mydrivers ↗

DeepSeek's AI agent tool adds experimental support for Anthropic's Claude Code extensions

DeepSeek released a test version of Harness, the AI agent software whose unannounced desktop app surfaced in the September 25th edition, with an experimental layer that runs Mods, extensions for Anthropic's Claude Code coding agent. The layer is meant to let customizations developers write for Claude Code run inside DeepSeek's competing tool, so work built for one could carry over to the other. Anthropic launched Mods days earlier as JavaScript or TypeScript event handlers that can watch, change or take over Claude Code's tool calls, prompts and interface. The layer so far runs three of Anthropic's official demo Mods, and DeepSeek's documentation says it does not yet offer full practical compatibility.

Read at 36Kr ↗

MILITARY WATCH

Chinese army brigade drills lasers, microwave weapons and guns against drone swarm

A brigade of the 75th Group Army, ran a live-fire drill against a drone swarm attacking at ultra-low altitude, according to a CCTV News report carried by Global Times. Cheap drones flown in large numbers make missile interception expensive, so the drill layered weapons with a lower cost per shot against a single swarm. Military commentator Zhang Xuefeng said a typical 200-kilogram-class suicide drone costs only tens of thousands of dollars, while long-range air defense missiles cost several million apiece. Ground lasers and high-power microwave weapons, whose pulses destroy a drone's internal electronics, first blinded and jammed the swarm. Interceptor drones then took targets that slipped through, and anti-aircraft guns cleared the rest.

Read at Global Timesstate media ↗

III

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

AI chipmaker Zhongcheng Hualong wins largest lot in Qinghai computing center tender

Zhongcheng Hualong, a Chinese AI chip designer founded in 2017, won the largest lot, worth 180 million yuan ($27 million), in a tender for an AI data center in Qinghai, Sina Tech reports. The buyer scored bidders on volume supply, supply chain assurance and long-term maintenance alongside chip specifications, so the top lot went to a domestic supplier judged on delivering and servicing hardware at scale. Chinese GPU designer Biren Technology placed second. Zhongcheng Hualong's second-generation HL200 chip, released in August, is built to run already trained AI models. It ships in cabinets of 64 linked accelerator cards, which the company says scale to clusters of 10,000.

Read at Sina Techstate media ↗