China – Tencent Cloud and Elastic have expanded their strategic collaboration, with the companies planning to deepen technical and product development around AI search, enterprise data and agentic applications.
The announcement was made in Shenzhen on the 31st of August, alongside the launch of Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) Enterprise Edition. The service integrates Elastic’s enterprise search and AI capabilities into Tencent Cloud’s Elasticsearch offering.
Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine used for applications including e-commerce product search, in-app search, and the analysis and troubleshooting of system logs. Tencent Cloud has provided cloud services based on Elasticsearch since 2016.
The companies said enterprise search is taking on a greater role in AI applications as organisations seek to retrieve relevant information from internal data to provide context for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents.
Patrick Dixon, Senior Director of Channels & Alliances for APJ and Vice President for China at Elastic, said that the growing capabilities of LLMs are increasing the importance of context in enterprise AI applications. He said agents need access to accurate enterprise data when required to support their responses, decisions and execution.
Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) Enterprise Edition combines keyword and semantic search with support for LLM and agent integration. The service is designed to allow AI models and agents to retrieve information from enterprise data while keeping historical data searchable.
Tencent Cloud said it has also made engineering enhancements to its Elasticsearch service. In selected AI search scenarios, the company said performance has improved by up to five times, hybrid search latency has decreased by 60%, and memory consumption has fallen by more than 50%.
The service can be integrated with existing enterprise data architectures and used alongside Tencent Hunyuan large language models and the Tencent Cloud TCRay inference platform. Tencent Cloud is also offering technical migration and upgrade services for customers using open-source editions or self-managed Elasticsearch clusters.
Some enterprises are already using the search capabilities for AI and security-related applications. Tencent ima uses Elasticsearch as the retrieval layer for its knowledge base, supporting keyword and semantic search. Tencent Cloud said that following optimisation for concurrent searches, memory consumption decreased by 71% and retrieval performance increased by 58%.
At NIO, Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service forms part of a security data intelligence system. The system identifies relevant information from large volumes of security data for further analysis by AI. Tencent Cloud said the system processes hundreds of billions of records each quarter and that, in one attack investigation, the time required to retrieve and reconstruct an attack chain was reduced from most of a day to two minutes.
“AI search is evolving from a standalone retrieval capability into infrastructure that connects enterprise data, models, and agentic applications. Tencent Cloud will combine Elastic’s enterprise-grade capabilities with its own experience in operating large-scale systems and its AI ecosystem, helping more enterprises establish context infrastructure for the AI era,” said Cheng Bin, General Manager of Data Platform Products at Tencent Cloud Data Analytics.
“Search in 2026 is, in essence, about test-time compute. When search quality falls short, teams should first consider whether additional inference compute can address the problem before adding data or switching to a larger model,” said Han Xiao, Vice President of AI at Elastic.
Tencent Cloud said it was among the early cloud providers in China to establish a Platinum-level partnership with Elastic. The companies have collaborated for more than seven years, with Tencent Cloud also contributing to the Elastic open-source community.
Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service currently operates 20,000 clusters and 100,000 nodes, according to the company. The infrastructure has been used to support high-volume search traffic during events including the China Media Group Spring Festival Gala and the Paris Olympic Games.
