The Beijing-based company spent $5.5 billion (about PLN 22.3 billion at the current exchange rate) for the acquisition of artificial intelligence chips in China in 2025, said 2 people acquainted with Chinese technology giant's plans in an interview with The Financial Times. That's over twice as much as last year.
"ByteDance faces pressure"
The Chinese company besides plans to invest around 6.8 billion dollars (about PLN 27.6 billion) abroad to build its basic models training capabilities utilizing advanced Nvidia chips.
About 60% of ByteDance's home orders for semiconductors will go to Chinese suppliers specified as Huawei and Cambricon. The remainder will be spent on Nvidia chips.
Beijing gave the Chinese technology companies informal instructions to buy at least 30% of their chips from home suppliers, claims the whistleblowers "The Financial TIMES".
The US$6.8 billion abroad investment was planned to increase ByteDance's computing power in artificial intelligence for model training. This investment may face challenges related to the late expanded US export controls to hinder Chinese companies from developing key technologies.
ByteDance faces force from Washington. The company's flagship application, TikTok, restored services to 170 million users in the US. This was due to the decision of president Donald Trump of the United States, who stated that TikTok-related companies would not be held liable for violating American law unless the platform was sold.
Company's uncertain future
Trump signed an executive regulation on Monday 20 January allowing TikTok to proceed operating in the US for another 75 days. The President, on the another hand, stated that the American company is to have a 50 percent stake in the application in the future. Trump said he would "certainly" impose duties on China if Beijing rejected the proposal.
Such a transaction could affect the plans of the future first ByteDance public offering. The company valued at $300 billion (about PLN 214 billion) during the fresh own shares acquisition programme.
Even before the fresh turmoil in the US, the company developed a immense budget for the acquisition of graphics processors in 2025. ByteDance under the leadership of the founder of Zhang Yiming's technology group became a Chinese leader in AI development. The company doubles its efforts to build its own infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty ImagesFounder ByteDance Zhang Yiming
The company expanded its computing capacity in Southeast Asia, in peculiar Malaysia. respective manufacture experts in an interview with The Financial Times said that although Chinese companies are banned from buying Nvidia chips, since 2023 they have been able to safe access to this technology through lease agreements with another suppliers.
This gap was late closed by Joe Biden's administration. It has issued fresh rules according to which the identity of the persons active in trading chips must be subject to the verification process.
Although Trump may take a different position on export control, the rules — if strictly implemented — will make buying for chips abroad more hard for ByteDance than ever.
One expert stated that this year the Chinese company placed large orders to build abroad production capacity in the field of artificial intelligence. This should be adequate for most of the company's needs in 2025, but what happens later remains uncertain.
A technological race of planet leaders
ByteDance's budget for buying AI chips abroad was previously estimated by The Information news service, although the company cut off from media reports. In consequence to the reports of The Financial Times ByteDance, he replied: “Anonymously obtained information about our plan is incorrect”.
ByteDance besides faces challenges from wealthy local competitors specified as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. These Chinese companies intensive investment in generic artificial intelligence.
ByteDance is by far the largest client of Nvidia in China. However, the company can only buy little advanced chips for Chinese data centers specified as H20 Nvidii. This is simply a specialized and little efficient version of graphics processors adapted to American export controls.
According to Omdia consulting company estimates in 2024. China ordered about 230,000 Nvidia chips, mostly H20. This is compared with 485 1000 more advanced Hopper chips purchased by Microsoft last year and 224 1000 purchased by Meta.
According to data published by Omdia in 2024, technology companies worldwide spent an estimated $229 billion (over 927 billion) on servers. Most, 31 billion dollars (over 125 billion PLN), released Microsoft and Amazon – 26 billion dollars (more than 105 billion PLN).
© The Financial Times Limited 2025.All rights reserved.No distribution, copying or modification shall be permitted.Onet assumes sole work for translation, Financial Times Limited bears no work for its accuracy or quality
