Tencent Launches Hy Image 3.5 AI Model, Shares Jump 7% in Hong Kong

Tencent Holdings Ltd. released its Hy Image 3.5 Preview model on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, integrating the image-generation tool across its Yuanbao chatbot, film-editing and design products. Tencent shares rose more than 7% in Hong Kong. The Shenzhen-based company tested the model with hundreds of in-house designers and said it matches ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro and edges past Alphabet's Nano Banana Pro and Alibaba's Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro. Tencent did not release quantified benchmarks. The launch coincides with Alibaba's AI conference and signals Tencent's push to close a gap with rivals ByteDance and Alibaba in large language and image models. Tencent recently hired former OpenAI researchers Yao Shunyu, now chief AI scientist, and Tian Yonglong, who leads vision-language models under the Hunyuan team. Yao has said Tencent will prioritize product integration over leaderboard scores.