TikTok parent company Bytedance spends $23 billion! Plans to seize AI survival rights in 2026

ByteDance plans to spend 160 billion yuan to build AI infrastructure in 2026. "Half of the budget" will be spent on buying Huida H200 chips in an effort to maintain AI competitiveness under the blockade of the Trump 2.0 era.
(Preliminary summary: The US version of TikTok is officially sold: Oracle and other three major US capital groups take ownership, ByteDance retains the brain, does Trump win? )
(Background supplement: "ByteDance Guo Yu" retired at the age of 28, and spoke the truth at the age of 34: Financial freedom is not real freedom )

Contents of this article

According to the Financial Times, one year after Trump returned to the White House, and in the winter of 2025, when Washington’s blockade on China’s technology industry continues to increase, ByteDance issued a check of 160 billion yuan for AI infrastructure next year in an attempt to maintain its survival space under a possible future “chip blockade.” This budget, equivalent to $23 billion, is the bet that TikTok’s parent company is making on AI.

The capital scale is only 1/10 of Silicon Valley

According to the latest internal documents, ByteDance will increase its capital expenditure in 2026 from 150 billion yuan to 160 billion yuan, an annual increase of about 7%. Compared with Capex, which will be worth more than $300 billion in 2025 by the four major U.S. cloud giants, ByteDance’s amount is less than one-tenth of its rivals. However, in the context of the Chinese market, this is the maximum energy that a single private enterprise can use, which shows its anxiety about the AI cost curve.

Funds are not the only threshold, but chip acquisition is the core. Without high-performance GPUs, money cannot be converted into computing power. Without computing power, model iteration will come to a halt. Bytedance regards this 160 billion yuan as a "survival insurance policy", aiming to shorten the research and development cycle gap with Microsoft and Meta.

85 billion yuan to buy H200

About half of it, 85 billion yuan (about 12 billion U.S. dollars), was earmarked for the purchase of advanced AI processors. According to outside analysis, ByteDance has placed an order with Huida for 20,000 H200 chips, and the unit price premium is still being negotiated.

However, due to the Trump administration's latest export rules, this batch of orders is currently in a "pending approval" status, and may need to be downgraded in specifications or transferred to a third location for delivery. Earlier rumors in the market that the procurement scale of "850 billion yuan" has been clarified as a misunderstanding, but the figure of 85 billion itself is still the largest GPU procurement case in the history of Chinese companies.

Doubao and overseas data centers use two lines to pull computing power

Where the money is spent depends on the application thrust. ByteDance's internal multi-modal large model has supported the domestic chat robot "Doubao". In recent years, the number of users has expanded exponentially, and the inference usage is close to that of the short video architecture. In order to reduce the risk of domestic cloud restrictions, Bytedance has simultaneously deployed new generation data centers in Southeast Asia and Europe for model training and TikTok recommendation algorithm iteration. Spend money to buy the hardware first, and only then can the application continue to iterate.

In the context of the rapid escalation of semiconductor export controls, ByteDance’s big move is more like a defensive hoarding, or it may be a bet on a short policy window. According to the Financial Times, ByteDance executives assessed that “fewer chips will be available to buy next year, and it will be harder to spend money.” It can be seen that time has become the element with the highest hidden cost.