TikTok owner Bytedance readies itself for 2026 with $14 billion NVidia AI chips budget

TikTok owner boosts budget to 100 billion Yuan for H200 GPUs, despite geopolitical uncertainty and homegrown alternatives.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and China's largest builder of AI infrastructure, is reportedly readying its largest-ever capital expenditure for artificial intelligence, planning to spend the equivalent of 100 billion yuan (approximately $14 billion USD) on Nvidia AI chips in 2026.

This enormous commitment, contingent on government approval, marks an increase from the estimated 85 billion yuan ($12.15 billion USD) ByteDance spent on chips in 2025 and underscores the escalating computational demands of its services, from the TikTok "For You" algorithm to its burgeoning cloud business, Volcano Engine, and its popular Chinese chatbot, Doubao.

The H200 and the geopolitical hurdle

The vast majority of the planned spending is earmarked for Nvidia's H200 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The H200 is a specialized, slightly down-rated version of the company's powerful Hopper architecture, which the US government has selectively approved for sale to China under restricted conditions.

It’s Nvidia's second-most powerful chip currently allowed for export to China. Chinese tech firms are still barred from accessing Nvidia’s latest-generation Blackwell products.

ByteDance’s computational demand is being driven by the explosive growth of its internal AI applications. Its chatbot Doubao, for instance, processed over 50 trillion tokens daily in December 2025, up from 4 trillion the previous year, highlighting the urgent need for massive, continuous AI training capacity.

The dual strategy

To keep up with these demands, ByteDance is pursuing a dual strategy, investing heavily in both foreign and domestic hardware solutions. On top of the multi-billion-dollar Nvidia order, reports suggest a planned order of up to 40 billion yuan (approx. $5.7 billion) worth of Huawei Ascend processors in 2026.

Additionally, the company is co-developing its own custom AI GPUs with partners like Broadcom and TSMC for use in high-volume, low-latency inference tasks, such as powering the recommendation engines behind TikTok and Douyin.

This record-breaking budget positions ByteDance not just as a content platform, but as a foundational AI player willing to spend heavily to close the technological gap with U.S. rivals like Google and Meta.