Bytedance Allegedly Plans to Produce Self-Developed AI Chips at Samsung

Ousting the AI Front-Runner Bytedance Allegedly Plans to Produce Self-Developed AI Chips at Samsung

2026-02-23 From Henrik Bork | Translated by AI 3 min Reading Time

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Nvidia is once again at risk of losing a major customer because it prefers to build its own AI chips. According to media reports, the Chinese technology group Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, is developing its own GPUs. Production is set to begin as early as March 2026.

Bytedance has popularized the short video format with the TikTok app, among other things. AI is used in many of the Group's products.(Image: Bytedance) — Bytedance has popularized the short video format with the TikTok app, among other things. AI is used in many of the Group's products.
(Image: Bytedance)

Bytedance, which is actually a major customer of Nvidia, reportedly wants to have its own AI chips produced by Samsung. The publicly unconfirmed project is codenamed "SeedChip" within the company, Reuters reported. The news agency first reported on Bytedance's latest chip plans in an exclusive report.

The move would not be unusual. Baidu and Alibaba, Bytedance's two Chinese competitors, have been developing their own GPUs and memory chips for some time now. In the USA, hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are pursuing the same strategy. The companies' aim is to reduce the considerable costs of semiconductors. In China, there is also the fear of unpredictable boycotts by the US government, which sometimes approves Nvidia chips for China and sometimes bans them.

Expensive Standard

Nvidia's AI chips and the associated CUDA software are still considered the gold standard. However, they are also just as expensive as the precious metal. There has long been a feeling in the industry in China that "people have suffered too long under Nvidia", writes the Chinese technology portal Kuai Keji.

As reported by Reuters and several Chinese trade media, Bytedance is now apparently also pursuing the path of vertical integration and is transforming itself from a pure chip consumer to a designer and manufacturer of semiconductors. The internal team for this at Bytedance is said to have grown to 1,000 employees.

The new cooperation with Samsung Electronics, reported by Reuters, would have the advantage for Bytedance that not only AI chips but also the memory chips required in large quantities could be procured. Samsung offers a "complete solution for AI chips and high bandwidth memory (HBM)", market observers are quoted as saying.

There have been reports since 2024 that Bytedance wants to produce its own chips. At the time, there was talk of a collaboration with Broadcom. At the time, the chips were to be produced by TSMC. Bytedance is now said to have ordered at least 100,000 AI inference units for the current year. An expansion of chip production to 350,000 units per year is reportedly planned for later.

Artificial Intelligence in All Products

The company relies heavily on AI applications. TikTok is called "Douyin" in Chinese, and its Doubao chatbot is one of the most successful AI apps in the People's Republic. An AI model for creating videos called C-Dense 2.0 is also very popular. Bytedance also relies heavily on artificial intelligence for e-commerce and services for companies in the cloud.

The expenditure for the procurement of infrastructure is correspondingly high. By the end of last year, Bytedance had reportedly procured almost 120,000 A100, A800 and H800 AI accelerator cards from Nvidia. Bytedance has also purchased almost one million H20, L20 and L40 chips in the USA.

According to unofficial reports, Bytedance is planning to spend up to 160 billion yuan on AI in the current year, the equivalent of just under 20 billion euros. Around half of this will allegedly be used to finance the company's own in-house chip development.

Supplement Instead of Replacement

If Bytedance follows the strategies of the other technology groups, it is unlikely to aim to completely replace its Nvidia chips, at least for the time being. Insiders expect that it will continue to use Nvidia chips in its development. However, Bytedance could increasingly rely on AI chips produced in China by Huawei or Cambricon for its expensive inference computing services and later also on its own semiconductors produced jointly with Samsung. (sb)

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