Chinese gaming giants pour billions into AI, with NetEase and Tencent backing DeepSeek
AI summary
A Zinc Scale article published via TMTPost says 15 major listed Chinese gaming companies took part in 72 investment deals worth over 87.2 billion yuan between 2025 and early July 2026, with only seven deals worth about 200 million yuan tied directly to games and the rest flowing mainly into AI and robotics. It reports that NetEase put in roughly 3 billion yuan and Tencent about 10 billion yuan in DeepSeek's first outside funding round in June 2026, and that 37 Interactive Entertainment booked about 1.016 billion yuan in investment income from its Zhipu stake.
In-depth insight
It shows Chinese game studios treating AI stakes as a new growth engine that feeds back into their core development and marketing.