ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, aims to become an artificial intelligence (AI) giant. To achieve this, it is rushing towards Nvidia processors, despite the heavy American sanctions weighing on China.
Nvidia’s largest customer
An investigation of Financial Times reveals that the company has become Nvidia’s largest customer in China. According to a source cited by the media, no other Asian industrial player would make as many purchases of chips from the American manufacturer. But White House restrictions prevent it from marketing its best products in the Middle Kingdom, so ByteDance falls back on H20s, AI processors specifically restricted for the Chinese market.
ByteDance has, of course, more than one string to its bow. It seeks to circumvent sanctions to access the precious key: Nvidia’s powerful H100 and Blackwell chips, which provide advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. So, the Chinese company intends to increase its IT capacity outside Chinaincluding plans for new data centers in Malaysia. Led by its co-founder Zhang Yiming, it is investing billions in AI infrastructure.
Doubts about TikTok persist
This pivot towards AI is not a coincidence. ByteDance is facing a slowdown in the activities of TikTok and Douyin (its Chinese equivalent), after growth that exploded for several years. Furthermore, the possible ban on the social network in the United States sows doubt, with a law requiring its sale to an American entity under penalty of ban.
This also involves talent acquisition. The Beijing-based company did not hesitate to poach some of the best engineers and researchers in AI, who worked at the e-commerce giant Alibaba, as well as in startups such as 01.ai and Zhipu.
ByteDance wants to develop its own accelerators
ByteDance has developed the most popular AI application in China, the Doubao chatbot. It has 60 million regular monthly active mobile users, compared to nearly 13 million for Wenxiaoyan, technology from Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google.
But this is only the beginning. With a view to developing ever more advanced models, the company is also seeking to create its own AI accelerators. For this, it draws inspiration from Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, which should allow it to no longer depend on Nvidia, both for the training and inference of its AIs.
- ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has become Nvidia’s largest customer in China, and potentially in all of Asia.
- The company aims to become an AI juggernaut. In addition to infrastructure, it also invests in talent.
- His aspirations come as his social media business faces a slowdown, while the specter of TikTok being banned in the United States continues to loom.
