Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is using Southeast Asia as a launch pad to take its “cost-effective” artificial intelligence tools global, fronted by its workplace assistant WorkBuddy, amid cutthroat competition at home.

The company was targeting existing regional customers of its cloud computing and big data services, particularly in markets such as Indonesia, according to Dowson Tong, CEO of Tencent’s Cloud and Smart Industries Group.

The international push coincided with triple-digit growth in overseas demand for Tencent’s AI services over the past year, with global businesses showing “very high interest and demand” for Chinese AI offerings, Tong said in an opening speech on Thursday at the company’s annual Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen.

To keep pace with demand, Tencent said it was stepping up its overseas infrastructure expansion, having added or expanded data centre capacity across markets including Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Japan and Saudi Arabia. The expansion strengthened Tencent Cloud’s footprint to cover clients from more than 150 countries and regions, Tong said.

“We’re seizing AI application opportunities to strengthen our global delivery capabilities,” Tong told summit attendees. At a separate press briefing on Wednesday, Tong said Tencent was at the “right moment to take these products that have been polished for the domestic market and take them outside”.

The cross-border push comes as Chinese tech titans and frontier AI labs engage in an aggressive price and product war at home, rolling out rapid iterations to capture both domestic and international market“As with many industries in China, the competition is intense, but with that competition, everybody improves along the way,” Tong said. “Many of these models are not only serving the China market, but also looking at overseas opportunities, which are tremendous.”Tencent released the international version of WorkBuddy in early July across 21 markets, including Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. The company said it was also accelerating the international roll-out of other AI products, including design tools and AI-assisted coding solutions.

“In the international market … the penetration rate of AI agents in everyday life and workplaces is extremely low, which really sheds light on the future potential of a big market opportunity for us outside the home market,” Jade Ding, head of overseas business growth for WorkBuddy, said on Wednesday.

In mainland China, WorkBuddy ranked as the most popular desktop workplace AI agent in June with nearly 21 million users, leading ByteDance’s Trae IDE and Alibaba Group Holding’s QoderWork, according to domestic research firm Analysys. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Tong acknowledged that Tencent’s overseas AI drive remained in an “investment phase” aimed at driving early user adoption rather than immediate commercial returns, with monetisation slated for a later stage.

At the same time, computing power constraints continue to challenge the scale of China’s AI expansion, despite Tencent significantly increasing capital expenditure on data centre infrastructure this year.

“We are still somewhat supply-constrained in terms of bringing AI agent capabilities to the public,” Tong said, citing surging compute consumption from WorkBuddy and growing AI use across Tencent products, including the Xiaowei assistant in its super app WeChat.

Beyond internal workloads, demand was being further stretched by corporate cloud clients – including carmakers, autonomous driving developers and humanoid robot firms – training proprietary models on Tencent’s infrastructure, Tong added.

Separately, Tencent on Thursday announced a strategic partnership with Visa, expanding collaboration across cross-border payments, agentic commerce and enterprise AI solutions, among other areas.

“Today, the global competitiveness of Chinese technology no longer lies in low costs but increasingly in the efficiency brought about by AI,” Tong said on Thursday.