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TikTok-owner ByteDance plans to spend $12bn on AI chips in 2025

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TikTok-owner ByteDance plans to spend bn on AI chips in 2025

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TikTok-owner ByteDance plans to spend more than $12bn on artificial intelligence infrastructure this year, betting on the cutting-edge technology for new growth while under pressure from Washington to sell its popular video-sharing app in the US.

The Beijing-based company has budgeted Rmb40bn ($5.5bn) to acquire AI chips in China in 2025, according to two people familiar with the plans, which would double the amount it spent last year. The group also plans to invest about $6.8bn overseas to beef up its foundation model training capabilities using advanced Nvidia chips.

About 60 per cent of ByteDance’s domestic semiconductor orders would go to Chinese suppliers such as Huawei and Cambricon, while the rest would be spent on Nvidia chips that have been watered down to align with US export controls, according to the people.

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Beijing has given Chinese tech companies informal guidance to buy at least 30 per cent of their chips from the country’s own suppliers, the people added.

The $6.8bn in overseas investment was budgeted to build out ByteDance’s AI computing capacity for model training. This investment could face challenges from recently expanded US export controls designed to hamper Chinese companies building sensitive technologies.

A worker holding a semiconductor wafer on the production line of a factory in Binzhou, China © Chu Baorui/VCG via Getty Images

The push comes as ByteDance faces pressure in its core social media business. TikTok restored service to 170mn US users on Sunday after the country’s incoming President Donald Trump vowed that companies that distributed and hosted the platform would not be held liable for violating a US law that banned the video app unless it was sold.

While Trump signed an executive order on Monday to keep TikTok open for 75 days, he said he wanted a US company to have 50 per cent ownership in TikTok in the future. Trump said he could “certainly” put tariffs on China if it rejected a deal.

Any such transaction could affect plans for a future ByteDance initial public offering, with the company valuing itself at $300bn during a recent share buyback programme.

The company drew up its huge purchasing budget for graphic processing units in 2025 before the recent interventions in the US.

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ByteDance, which under the direction of the tech group’s founder Zhang Yiming has become the frontrunner in China’s AI race, is doubling down to build out its own AI infrastructure to train its foundation model, as well as to implement AI functions across its various platforms.

It has ramped up computing capacity in south-east Asia, particularly in Malaysia. Though Chinese companies have been banned from purchasing Nvidia chips outside of the US since 2023, they have been able to secure access to chips through rental agreements with third-party data centre providers, several industry insiders said.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming at a conference near Jiaxing, China, in 2016
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming © VCG via Getty Images

This loophole was closed last week by the outgoing Biden administration, which issued new rules that the identity of both the owner and operator of the chips must undergo a review process.

While Trump could take a different stance on export controls, the regulations — if strictly implemented — would make ByteDance’s chip purchases overseas more difficult than ever.

It has already made large orders to build up overseas AI capacity this year, such as through rental agreements, according to one of the people. It should be sufficient for most of the company’s needs in 2025 but what happened after that remained uncertain, the person added.

ByteDance’s budget for purchases of AI chips overseas was previously reported by news outlet The Information. In response to the FT’s reporting, ByteDance said: “The anonymously sourced information about our plan is incorrect.”

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ByteDance also faces challenges from deep-pocketed local competitors, such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, which are investing heavily in generative AI. Alongside these rivals, it has been pushing out more capable models and lowering costs for developers.

Chinese companies still need to build up the capacity of AI data centres onshore to support the use of AI applications even after the models have been trained.

ByteDance plans to use most of its Chinese AI chips — including Huawei’s Ascend and Cambricon — for “inference” tasks, the computation undertaken by large language models to generate a response to a prompt.

ByteDance released its AI chatbot Doubao in August 2023 and the AI app has become China’s most popular AI application, according to website analytics site Aicpb.com.

Doubao, which means “beanbag” in Chinese, had 71mn regular monthly active users as of December, compared with OpenAI’s 300mn weekly active users globally.

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Nvidia recorded $11.6bn in revenue from China, including Hong Kong, or about 13 per cent of its global total, during the first three quarters of 2024, according to company filings.

ByteDance is by far the largest client for Nvidia in China. The TikTok parent can only buy less advanced chips such as Nvidia’s H20 for Chinese data centres, a specialised and less-powerful version of its GPUs tailored to align with US export controls.

In 2024, it ordered about 230,000 of Nvidia’s chips, mostly H20s, according to estimates from tech consultancy Omdia. This compares with 485,000 of the more advanced “Hopper” chips bought by Microsoft last year and the 224,000 acquired by Meta.

Tech companies around the world have spent an estimated $229bn on servers in 2024, according to Omdia, led by Microsoft’s $31bn in capital expenditure and Amazon’s $26bn.

Additional reporting by Ryan McMorrow in Beijing and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

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Trump fires last members of election commission, inciting fears of midterm ‘chaos’

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Trump fires last members of election commission, inciting fears of midterm ‘chaos’

Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.

The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission ⁠were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other ⁠two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from ​the White House presidential personnel office.

“On ‌behalf of President ‌Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position ‌as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election ‌administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National ​Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

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“It is ⁠irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on ​causing chaos for ​our election officials across this ​country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a ​Thursday statement. “This ‌move undermines the integrity ​of nonpartisan ​election administration.”

The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.

It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.

Reuters contributed reporting

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Former Olympian pleads not guilty in reflecting pool vandalism charges

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Former Olympian pleads not guilty in reflecting pool vandalism charges

Former U.S. Olympian David Hearn (left) walks with his attorney Norman Eisen to speak to reporters and protesters gathered after his arraignment at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

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Former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn pleaded not guilty to damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning.

Federal prosecutors charged Hearn with a single count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the pool.

Hearn has previously claimed, which his attorneys repeated during a short press conference outside the court, that he simply touched the water in the pool out of curiosity.

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The Trump administration had just completed a $14 million renovation of the pool.

But shortly after the work finished, peeling paint and algae gathered in the water. The remodel has been largely criticized as a massive failure and waste of taxpayer dollars.

Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean released Hearn on his own recognizance. His next hearing is scheduled for Aug. 5.

Norm Eisen, one of Hearn’s attorneys, spoke to reporters outside of court following the hearing. He said the administration is using Hearn as a “scapegoat … for their own failures.”

“It is not a crime to touch the reflecting pool, to touch water in the United States of America,” he said.

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Prosecutors say there is a host of evidence against Hearn.

This is a developing story.

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

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Three more people charged with damaging Reflecting Pool after Trump’s multimillion-dollar restoration | CNN Politics

Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Officers say they detained Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.

One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents.

The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said.

All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.

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Several “partnering law enforcement agencies assigned to the Reflecting Pool” working with US Park Police were involved in detaining the two men and one woman — including officers from Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and California.

One of the officers said in court documents that Thiers “admitted to removing a piece of blue sealant from the Reflecting Pool and still had it in his hand when I made contact with him.”

The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.

Lawyers for Thiers and Dennison-Gibby declined to comment. CNN has reached out to Carreno’s attorney.

If found guilty of destruction of property, the defendants could be fined up to $1,000 and face a maximum of 180 days behind bars.

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The New York Times first reported that three additional people had been charged with damaging the Reflecting Pool.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals caused major damage to the pool by gashing the lining after his administration spent more than $14 million on renovations, though he has not provided evidence to support that claim. The officers who charged Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby did not accuse them of gashing the lining.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, DC, last week for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool. Hearn — unlike Carreno, Thiers and Dennison-Gibby – was charged with destruction of property with a value of more than $1,000 which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. He is set to be arraigned in court Thursday.

Crews began draining the Reflecting Pool over the weekend to make repairs, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for the second time in three months.

The move comes after weeks of problems – algae blooms, green-hued water, a chipping bottom and the administration’s allegations of vandalism – that have plagued the iconic landmark, making its woes the subject of national interest.

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