Tencent unveiled its progress in chips for the first time this week, which immediately gave its stock price a modest boost. Silicon seems distant from the giant’s main arenas of video games and social networks, so observers suggest that Tencent’s move is to signal that it’s aligned with China’s long-run goals to self-develop semiconductors at a time its gaming unit is under a slate of regulatory assaults. Other major tech powerhouses, from Alibaba, Baidu, to Huawei, have all answered Beijing’s silicon push with their in-house chips.
On the other hand, for a company with as much data to handle as Tencent, one should wonder why it didn’t get in on semiconductors earlier.
The three chips Tencent unveiled on Wednesday are all custom built: one for AI inference, one for video transcoding, and another for network interface.
There have been ample examples where internet behemoths start building their own specia …
