Tencent will have access to Nvidia’s cutting-edge B200 and B300 chips via cloud services operated by 
Datasection. 
First Plus Financial Holdings — founded by individuals originally from China — was brought in by Datasection CEO Norihiko Ishihara as a significant investor.
After Datasection switched to running AI data centers last year, it has gained more than $1.2B in contracts with one large customer to access a significant portion of its 15,000 Nvidia Blackwell processors. That customer, which has a relationship with Datasection via a third party, is Tencent.
The deal allows Tencent to use a legal but geopolitically fraught strategy to access advanced AI chips at a time Washington restricts the export of Nvidia’s top hardware to China.
The set-up has also turned Datasection into one of the largest neoclouds in Asia, which alongside peers such as CoreWeave in the US and Nebius in Europe has grown rapidly from renting out its stash of Nvidia GPUs to the world’s largest tech groups.
Datasection’s growth reflects how China’s big tech companies have been forced by US curbs to seek ways of accessing Nvidia’s top-tier chips overseas, fuelling the rise of AI data centres stocked with Blackwell processors across Asia.
Biden-era rules were set to close this legal loophole but were scrapped by Donald Trump in May. Datasection moved quickly to complete its Osaka deal afterwards.
Earlier this month, Trump approved sales of a lower-performance chip for China, which could allow the likes of Tencent to begin building out its own AI data centers with Nvidia chips once again.
Using the overseas computing workaround, rather than buying Nvidia chips, may be “the more attractive choice for Chinese tech groups”.
Tencent and its peers Alibaba and ByteDance, are training AI models abroad and selling the computing power to other companies.
Datasection has plans for AI data centers with more than 100,000 Nvidia processors. Its first 15,000 chips are mostly contracted for 3 years to Tencent.
In July, Datasection agreed to pay $272M for 5,000 Nvidia B200 chips for its Osaka facility, backed by a $406M three-year contract with “one of the world’s largest cloud service providers”. In Aug, crates of servers loaded with Nvidia’s latest GPUs arrived in Japan.
The companies soon struck another three-year $800M deal for a second AI data center in 
Sydney that will deploy tens of thousands of B300s — Nvidia’s latest chips.
Datasection said this month that the first 10,000 B300s for the Sydney data center will cost $521M.
It will be “the world’s first hyperscale AI cluster by using B300 chips”. The Australian facility will predominantly be used by Tencent in the coming years.
The contracts with customers are typically three years long, with the possibility of a two-year extension at his discretion.
The contracts are structured through a partner entity — in Tencent’s case, with Tokyo-based tech company NowNaw — in order to protect the data of individual clients. The agreements can also be canceled by Datasection if regulations change again between the US and China to make the business untenable.
However, the Japanese company’s strategy has come under fire.
Datasection was attacked by a short seller — Wolfpack Research — in Oct who questioned the relationships with Tencent and First Plus alleging that US export controls were being breached.
Ishihara had claimed in a presentation that approvals for the GPU usage had been cleared by 
Department of Commerce and Nvidia.
Datasection has also moved to raise ¥50B by issuing equity warrants to First Plus that could dilute existing shareholders by up to 200%. Datasection has said First Plus wants to keep its stake below one-third.
Ishihara said First Plus does not want to fully consolidate Datasection in its accounts and has also given up voting rights to avoid scrutiny under Japan’s foreign exchange control act, which performs a national security function.
ft.com/content/9b47c3
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Byron Wan
@Byron_Wan
Tencent has secured access to high-end Nvidia AI chips — which remain restricted to Chinese buyers — through a cloud service operated by Tokyo-based Datasection, which recently announced a deal to buy Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips to use in data centers in Japan and