Quietly accelerating its artificial intelligence ambitions, China’s ByteDance is developing its own AI chip and is in discussions with Samsung Electronics for manufacturing, according to 2 people familiar with the matter, as the TikTok parent looks to secure access to advanced processors.
ByteDance is aiming to receive sample chips by end-March, the sources said. The company plans to produce at least 100,000 units of the chip in 2026. One source said production could gradually scale up to as many as 350,000 units. The chip is designed for AI inference tasks.
Talks with Samsung also involve access to memory chip supplies, which are currently in extremely short supply due to the global build-out of AI infrastructure. This makes the potential partnership especially attractive, one of the sources said. A ByteDance spokesperson said information about the company’s in-house chip project is inaccurate, without giving further details. Samsung declined to comment.
If completed, the effort would mark a key milestone for ByteDance, which has been working to develop chips for its AI workloads for several years. The company began actively hiring chip-related talent in 2022. A report published in June 2024 said ByteDance was working with US-based chip designer Broadcom on an advanced AI processor, with manufacturing planned to be outsourced to Taiwan-based TSMC.
Several global technology companies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have developed their own AI chips to reduce dependence on Nvidia, which dominates the market for advanced processors used in AI development.
For Chinese technology firms, US export controls on advanced chip sales have added urgency to in-house chip development. While ByteDance has not yet launched its own chip, rivals are further ahead. Alibaba last month unveiled its Zhenwu chip for large-scale AI workloads. Baidu already sells AI chips to external customers and plans to list its chip unit, Kunlunxin.
ByteDance’s chip effort, codenamed SeedChip, is part of a wider strategy to invest heavily in AI, spanning chips, large language models, and applications across short video, e-commerce, and enterprise cloud services. The company founded Seed in 2023 to focus on AI model development and deployment.
ByteDance plans to spend over 160,000,000,000 yuan, or about $22,000,000,000, on AI-related procurement this year. More than half of this is expected to go toward Nvidia chips, including H200 models, alongside continued development of its in-house chip.
At a January all-hands meeting, ByteDance executive Zhao Qi told employees that AI investments would benefit all business units. Zhao, who oversees the Doubao chatbot and its overseas version Dola, acknowledged the company’s AI models lag behind leaders such as OpenAI but committed to continued AI investment this year.
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