ByteDance to buy $14B in Nvidia AI chips next year

ByteDance has announced plans to buy $14 billion (~100B Yuan) in 2026 as its computing needs across its popular apps portfolio, Volcano Engine, and LLMs continue to increase. The Chinese tech firm’s 2026 budget has surpassed that of 2025, which was 85 billion Yuan (~$12.15B), although the final figure has yet to be confirmed.

Furthermore, it remains to be confirmed whether Nvidia can sell its H200 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) in China, as the recently lifted ban has yet to take full effect. Meanwhile, the company’s in-house chip manufacturing division has made significant progress in producing a lower-cost China-tailored chip that matches the performance of Nvidia H200 chips. 

ByteDance, which runs Douyin and TikTok, has a market capitalization of $500 billion and has established a chip design unit that employs over 1,000 workers. The company has further invested heavily in pursuing a mix of internal developments, like memory technologies such as high-bandwidth memory. It is also aggressively staking in related startups. 

Doubao processed over 50T tokens daily this month 

ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot processed over 50 trillion tokens daily in December alone, up from 4 trillion in December last year. The company said earlier this month that it is scaling back the capabilities of its agentic AI on its AI-powered smartphone.

Meanwhile, Volcano Engine is set to serve as the exclusive AI cloud partner of the Spring Festival Gala sponsored by China’s most viewed television broadcast, China Central Television. Volcan Engine’s president, Tai Dai, recently said the platform has more than 100 corporate clients who have spent over 1 trillion tokens to date. 

According to the SCMP, ByteDance’s chip division is also working closely with its frontier AI research team, Seed. The chip unit was relocated to Picoheart, a Singapore-incorporated subsidiary, in September amid escalating U.S.-China geopolitical tensions. Some of the company’s staff from mainland China were requested to relocate to Singapore to undertake sensitive tasks. 

Meanwhile, Nvidia hopes to export its newly approved H200 chips to Chinese customers before the Lunar New Year, which falls in late January or early February. Chinese tech companies have shown growing interest in the processor, which is Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip. However, Beijing has not yet approved any purchases, and the timeline could change depending on regulatory progress.  

ByteDance to order $5.7B worth of Huawei chips in 2026

ByteDance has also announced plans to order $5.7 billion worth of Huawei Ascend processors in 2026, as Huawei and Nvidia wrestle fiercely in the global AI space. A recent Huawei report suggested that Chinese firms are increasingly opting for local products over foreign ones as geopolitical tensions escalate. 

The report further reveals that ByteDance is about to receive its first batch of Huawei Ascend chips worth at least tens of billions of Yuans. It is also rumored that the company is inspecting a sample of Huawei chips, although it has not confirmed if it will make any orders. 

Meanwhile, the large-scale increase in local computing power is driven by the computing power gap that emerged in April after restrictions on Nvidia H200 chips were implemented. It is also driven by the explosive growth in the number of token calls for ByteDance’s AI application and cloud computing business.   

ByteDance is reportedly in the process of deepening ties with Huawei, as relying on Nvidia has proven too risky. Foreign chips can either be used to spy on China’s data or compromise consumer data privacy.

Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO, has commended her company’s progress, adding that it has built a strong foundation this year after the expansions to both its Ascend and Kunpeng AI chips. She further pointed out that Ascend AI chips now have over four million developers, along with over 3,000 partners.

Get $50 free to trade crypto when you sign up to Bybit now