HONG KONG, Feb 14, 2026, 19:53 (HKT) — Market closed.
- Tencent shares closed Friday at HK$532, down about 0.7%.
- Hong Kong’s tech gauge fell on Friday and trading turns thin ahead of a holiday-shortened week.
- Investors are weighing China’s burst of AI model launches and fresh U.S.-China policy headlines.
Tencent Holdings Ltd shares (0700.HK) ended Friday down about 0.7% at HK$532 in Hong Kong. The stock traded between HK$525 and HK$534.50, with turnover of about 26.9 million shares, price data showed. (Yahoo Finance)
The slip came as Hong Kong equities sold off, with the Hang Seng index down 1.72% and the Hang Seng Tech index off 0.9% at the close, RTHK reported. The securities market will run a half-day on Feb. 16 and then close from Feb. 17-19 for Lunar New Year, HKEX said. (RTHK News)
That calendar crunch lands as China’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector pushes out new models ahead of the holiday, keeping attention fixed on the internet heavyweights. A Reuters report on Saturday outlined releases and updates from firms including ByteDance and Alibaba, and said Tencent’s Hunyuan team has released a low-storage, compressed model designed to run on consumer hardware such as mobile phones. (Reuters)
Lower AI costs are also changing the mood. “DeepSeek showed the industry that you can create a very good model even when you’re resource-constrained,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia, in a Reuters report this week. He pointed to open source — publishing code so others can use and adapt it — as a defining approach for Chinese “foundation models”, the large systems that underpin chatbots and other AI apps. (Reuters)
Geopolitics added another headline risk on Friday. The United States briefly posted, then withdrew, an updated Pentagon list of Chinese firms allegedly aiding China’s military; the list already includes Tencent, Reuters reported. Eric Sayers, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said it “appears to be a process issue” tied to interagency sign-off. (Reuters)
Tencent often trades as a proxy for China’s consumer internet — games, social media, ads, payments — and the tone can flip fast when AI and policy collide. That is why a move that looks small on the day can still matter into a long break.
But the setup cuts both ways. Policy turns are hard to price, and AI competition can become a margin fight if the big platforms spend to defend users without a clear revenue payoff. U.S. markets have been wrestling with similar questions, with heavyweight tech and communications stocks swinging this week on worries about AI disruption and the cost of building the systems, Reuters reported. (Reuters)
Next up is the Feb. 16 half-day session in Hong Kong, followed by the Lunar New Year shutdown from Feb. 17-19, with normal trading set to resume Feb. 20, according to a broker note to clients. For Tencent, traders will be watching for any weekend spillover from China’s AI launch cycle and any fresh U.S.-China policy signals before the market reopens. (cjsc.com.hk)
