BEIJING/SINGAPORE – China’s ByteDance is developing artificial intelligence chips and is in talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture them, two people familiar with the matter said. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is trying to secure a supply of advanced processors.
ByteDance aims to receive sample chips by the end of March, they said. The company plans to produce at least 100,000 chips designed for AI inference tasks this year, one of the sources said and another person familiar with the matter said. ByteDance is considering increasing production to up to 350,000 units in stages, one of the people said.
The deal with Samsung is particularly attractive because it includes access to memory chip supplies, which are in exceptionally short supply as global AI infrastructure builds out, one of the people said. Information about ByteDance’s internal chip project is inaccurate, a company spokesperson said in a statement, without elaborating. Samsung declined to comment.
The research could be a milestone for ByteDance, which has long sought to develop chips to support AI workloads. The company’s chip efforts date back to at least 2022, when it began hiring chip staff in earnest. Reuters reported in June 2024 that ByteDance is collaborating with U.S. chip design company Broadcom to develop an advanced AI processor, and plans to outsource manufacturing to Taiwan’s TSMC.
Global tech giants such as Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have developed their own AI chips to reduce their dependence on Nvidia, a major supplier of advanced chips essential for AI development.
For Chinese tech companies, U.S. export restrictions on advanced chip sales to China have also increased the urgency to develop their own AI chips. Bytedance has yet to launch a chip of its own, but rivals Alibaba and Baidu are ahead of the curve in developing AI chips, with Alibaba last month announcing its Zhenwu chip for large-scale AI workloads. Baidu sells chips to external customers and plans to list its chip unit Kunlunxin soon.
The chip project, codenamed “SeedChip,” is part of ByteDance’s broader effort to direct resources toward AI development, from chips to large-scale language models, betting the technology will transform the company’s business portfolio, which spans short video, e-commerce, and enterprise cloud services.
The company founded Seed in 2023 to develop AI models and drive their applications.
ByteDance plans to spend more than 160 billion yuan ($22 billion) on AI-related procurements this year, more than half of which will be allocated to buying Nvidia chips, including the H200 model, and improving its own chips, one of the people said.
ByteDance executive Zhao Qi told employees at an all-hands meeting in January that the company’s AI investments would benefit all divisions, according to a fourth person briefed on the meeting.
Zhao, who oversees ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot and its international version Dola, acknowledged that the company’s AI models lag behind global leaders such as OpenAI, but pledged to continue supporting AI development this year, the person said.
(Reporting by Liam Moh, Fanny Potkin and Choi Pan; Additional reporting by Hyunju Jin; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Stephen Coates)
