After disbanding AI Lab and spending 84.6 billion dollars to buy cards in half a year, Tencent is going against the current
Author: Activision BeatingOriginal title: Tencent Still Has Dreams On August 12, 2026, Tencent released its financial report for the second quarter. Capital expenditure for a single quarter, $52.78 billion. Three months ago, that number was 31.9 billion. Moving forward a year, the total for the whole year would be less than 79.2 billion. This company has always been known for spending money with restraint. The speed at which it bought cards was once slow enough to make the market wonder if it actually wanted AI at the table. Now, it has brought the speed of spending money to this level within a year. At the earnings conference on the same day, Ma Huateng said that Tencent is “building a brand new, AI-enabled Tencent.” The hybrid was renamed HY, and Hy4 will be released soon. The last time this company described itself as “brand new” was in the era when WeChat was born. Tencent still has dreams. Its dream is not just AI; it needs to relearn to be an unstable company. In 2018, Pan Ran said in “Tencent Has No Dreams” that Tencent is a company like water. Water is good for all things, and there is no dispute; wherever there is a channel, it flows. Water has no personality, so water doesn't have dreams. It is natural for water to flow to a low place; backflow is for those who have reflux. In 2026, the 28-year-old company did something against nature. It admits that the article from eight years ago was right. It admits that it is no longer possible to live like water. On Wednesday, May 5, at 9 p.m., “Tencent Has No Dreams” was published. 13,000 words. At 2 o'clock in the evening, Liu Chiping and Tencent PR director Zhang Jun responded in the circle of friends. Liu Chiping said that Tencent is a larger organization and ecosystem than the outside world can imagine. “It's too narrow to reduce Tencent to the gains and losses of a product, a kind of strategic deployment, and one person's will.” At 2:19, a screenshot suspected of Ma Huateng's response began circulating in the circle of friends. At 2:39 the real Ma Huateng spoke up, saying “It's nice to have criticism” to a friend who cares about him. Afterwards, he said, “From writing the first line of code, my dream was how to make the best product, not how much money to make.” During the day, the national media quoted almost the full screenshot of Ma Huateng's response. Even Zhang Yiming spoke for Tencent in his circle of friends, saying this was a “Don Quixote imagination.” Tencent is not only powerful, but it is also constantly evolving in every dimension. Zhang Jun was on the long-haul flight that day. After landing, he said, “We certainly weren't as bad as the outside world thought, but the criticism also made us realize that we weren't as good as we thought.” Of course, there were a few different voices about that article at the time. Hong Bo said that many of the questions mentioned in the article are real questions, but is there only one correct answer for such a large company? “Perhaps the author thinks Zhang Yiming is the only correct answer. He is a bit superstitious about Zhang Yiming.” That article also recorded an earlier story. At the beginning of 2011, just after the 3Q war ended, Tencent held a general meeting to discuss what Tencent's ability to open up is. Ma Huateng asked the 16 executives who attended each to write down what they thought Tencent's core competencies were on paper, and came up with a total of 21 answers. Finally, decide on two. Capital, flow. The term capital was advocated by Liu Chiping. Opening up means releasing traffic and turning it into an investment. Traffic is open, capital is open, “I don't do it myself anymore.” These two terms have governed Tencent for ten years. The entrance to WeChat traffic and the exit of investment traffic is in the middle is a steady stream of cash generated by games and advertisements. JD's e-commerce portal entered the WeChat Jiugong grid. Sogou picked up the search, and Meituan took over the local life. Traffic is exchanged for shares, and shares are exchanged for allies. In ten years, Tencent's market capitalization has increased tenfold, surpassing Facebook's. When that article was published, it still looked invincible. If you look back and reread it eight years later, you'll find that the article predicted almost every time Tencent fell since then. Ten years later, on December 23, 2021, Tencent distributed 14.7% of JD shares to its shareholders, with a market value of about HK$100 billion. In January 2022, Sea holdings were reduced and $3.2 billion was cashed out. In November 2022, 9.6% of Meituan was split, or approximately HK$159.4 billion. The capital, which was designated as a “core competency” back then, was personally destroyed by Tencent. The water has flowed back and forth for the first time in decades. There is a section in the first AI Dream article that not many people paid attention back then. It's written in Tencent's AI. The Go program “Amazing Art” created by AI Lab successively lost to two amateur games. One is the personal hobby of Headline's vice president, and the other is an amateur work by several engineers on the WeChat translation team. Few people realize that...
