According to a report by the Financial Times on December 23, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance plans to expand its multi-billion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence next year, as it seeks to catch up with U.S. competitors.
Two people familiar with the matter said ByteDance (字节跳动) has preliminarily planned capital expenditures of RMB 160 billion (USD 23 billion) in 2026.
The figure would exceed the RMB 150 billion the company is investing this year in AI infrastructure, according to the sources.
About half of the planned spending will be allocated to the purchase of advanced semiconductors for the development of AI models and applications, the people said.
They added that while it remains uncertain whether leading Chinese companies will be able to access Nvidia chips, ByteDance has planned to spend RMB 85 billion on AI processors next year.
ByteDance is one of China’s largest builders of AI infrastructure and has ambitions to become a global leader in the field.
However, its spending still pales in comparison with that of major U.S. technology groups. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are expected to spend more than USD 300 billion this year on building data centres to support AI models and products.
The sources said ByteDance plans to purchase 20,000 Nvidia H200 chips through test orders, with each unit priced at around USD 20,000.
They added that if the company is able to purchase additional H200 chips without restrictions, its capital expenditure in 2026 could increase significantly.
The company is also spending billions of dollars leasing overseas data centres in order to legally access Nvidia’s most advanced hardware for training AI models and serving customers outside China. Such leasing arrangements are typically recorded as operating expenses rather than capital expenditures.
Although ByteDance’s open-source Doubao model has lagged behind domestic rivals such as Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek in independent benchmark tests, the company dominates the consumer-facing AI application segment.
Data from local analytics firm QuestMobile show that the Doubao (豆包) chatbot has surpassed DeepSeek to become China’s most popular chatbot by monthly active users and downloads. The company is also competing aggressively with Alibaba by promoting its Volcano Engine (火山引擎) cloud services to enterprise clients.
Analysts have found that ByteDance’s daily token usage—a metric measuring consumer use of AI services—rose sharply in October to more than 30 trillion tokens. By comparison, Google recorded 43 trillion tokens during the same month.
One ByteDance investor said that compared with other major Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba and Tencent, ByteDance’s key advantage lies in the fact that it is not publicly listed, giving it greater flexibility to pursue aggressive investment and long-term planning in AI.
ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.