ByteDance headquarters in Beijing
ByteDance wants to break free from the shackles of US sanctions and dependence on Nvidia.
According to insider reports, the TikTok parent company is developing its own AI processor under the codename "SeedChip."
Reuters reports that initial samples are to be delivered by the end of March. ByteDance denies the reports. Samsung declined to comment.
The Alliance Against Scarcity
The negotiations with Samsung are strategically brilliant: ByteDance is securing not only manufacturing capacity, but above all access to the extremely scarce HBM memory chips.
These are the "liquid gold" of the AI industry and nearly sold out worldwide.
The goal: 100,000 chips in 2026, with a perspective of 350,000 units for AI inference (model application).
The budget: ByteDance plans to spend over $22 billion (160 billion yuan) on AI procurement in 2026 – more than half still goes to Nvidia hardware (H200).
Excursus: Why ByteDance Needs Its Own Power
Parallel to the chip project, ByteDance is shocking the competition with software power: The new video tool Seedance 2.0 is thrilling beta testers and makes OpenAI's Sora 2 look partly dated.
The special feature: The model can adopt camera work, movements, and effects from reference videos and apply them to new scenes.
Initial demo videos show impressive results – whether the quality holds up in everyday use remains to be seen.
The release came just days after Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 and drove the stock prices of Chinese media and AI companies up by as much as 20%, according to the South China Morning Post.
📊 More details & data: CNET, Yahoo Finance, TechNode
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