In his words
This is a rare opportunity that only comes every few hundred years, similar to the Industrial Revolution ushered in electricity.
I feel that many companies are too hasty, seemingly in bid to boost their stocks. That’s unlike the way we always deal with.
Biography
Ma Huateng, universally known as Pony Ma (born 1971), co-founded Tencent in Shenzhen in 1998 and built it into one of the world’s largest companies — the owner of WeChat, the billion-user super-app, and the world’s biggest video game business. Famously low-key, he surfaces publicly only a few times a year, which makes his pronouncements unusually watched.
Patience, then the DeepSeek pivot
At Tencent’s May 2023 shareholder meeting, Ma upgraded his own assessment of AI from a once-in-a-decade internet opportunity to something on the scale of electricity — while pointedly refusing to rush a half-baked chatbot to market. The patience turned into a sprint in early 2025: after Liang Wenfeng’s DeepSeek released R1, Ma personally drove its integration across WeChat, the Yuanbao assistant, and Tencent’s product line in a “double-core” strategy alongside its own Hunyuan models, praising DeepSeek for making “an independent, truly open-source and free product.”
Ma has been candid that Tencent misjudged the timing — at an internal meeting he conceded the company had been too slow in the AI race and declared AI its top strategic priority, likening the coming agent-driven revamp of WeChat to the Red Envelope moment that made WeChat Pay. Skeptics note the admission itself: the electricity-scale opportunity he described in 2023 was first seized by a quant-fund side project, not by China’s mightiest platform.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/pony-ma