Exclusive-ByteDance plans new AI model trained on Huawei chips, sources say

(Reuters) – TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance plans to develop an artificial intelligence model trained primarily on chips from compatriot Huawei Technologies, three people familiar with the matter said, while U.S. restrictions have turned the social media giant into a hunt for chips.

ByteDance has turned to domestic suppliers of chips used in artificial intelligence and accelerated its own development since the US began restricting exports of advanced AI chips such as market leader Nvidia in 2022.

Artificial intelligence has become central to the technology industry, differentiating the offerings of companies in different sectors such as gaming and e-commerce through the integration of specialized artificial intelligence models that use pattern recognition to make decisions.

ByteDance’s next step in the AI ​​race is to use Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train a large-language AI model, said the sources, who declined to be identified on the grounds that the plan is confidential.

A fourth person said ByteDance was planning a new AI model but could not say whether it would use Huawei chips.

ByteDance is currently using the Ascend 910B primarily for less computationally intensive inference tasks, which involve pre-trained AI models making predictions, the three people and a separate source said.

Training AI models is much more demanding and requires huge amounts of data; This requires the use of ultra-high-performance chips such as Nvidia’s top-of-the-line graphics processing units.

One of the sources said the new model’s capability and complexity, measured by computing parameters, will be less powerful than ByteDance’s existing AI model, Doubao.

ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment. Michael Hughes, a TikTok spokesman in Washington DC, said on behalf of ByteDance: “The entire premise here is false. No new model is being developed.”

Huawei did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

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ByteDance ordered more than 100,000 Ascend 910B chips this year but had received orders for fewer than 30,000 as of July, too slow to meet the company’s needs, one of the sources said.

Limited supply and limited computing power compared to Nvidia’s chips sold in China have prevented ByteDance from setting a timeline for the new model, two of the sources said.

ByteDance’s existing AI technology is used in its flagship broad language model, which launched in August 2023 and has been rebranded as chatbot Doubao, and in many other applications, including text-to-video tool Jimeng. To compete with OpenAI, it introduced two video-focused Doubao models this month.

The use of such apps has grown rapidly since the beginning of this year, making ByteDance’s chatbot one of the most popular apps in China, with more than 10 million monthly active users.

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The growing emphasis on AI has made ByteDance one of the biggest buyers of Huawei’s AI chips, the three people said.

It is also the biggest buyer of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, which the US chipmaker designed for the Chinese market in response to trade restrictions, two of the sources said. TikTok’s owner is also Microsoft’s largest customer in Asia for Nvidia chips accessible via cloud computing, two separate sources said.

Reuters previously reported that ByteDance allocated $2 billion for Nvidia chips last year.

Nvidia declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Christopher Cushing)