According to the South China Morning Post, Chinese technology giant ByteDance plans to invest up to US$22 billion (160 billion yuan) in the technology field next year, most of which will be used for artificial intelligence-related infrastructure.
The South China Morning Post, citing Chinese research, said the spending would be double ByteDance's $11 billion investment in 2024, the highest capital expenditure by a Chinese technology company that year and almost equal to rivals Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent the total expenditure.
Zheshang researchers pointed out that ByteDance's huge capital expenditures have paid off, with its AI chatbot Doubao becoming the most popular AI chatbot in China. According to the South China Morning Post, researchers said the chatbot is also cheaper and comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-40.
The researchers note that Doubao's success is partly due to the model being free to the public. As of November, the chatbot had nearly 60 million monthly active users, allowing the model to access large amounts of training data.
Zheshang researchers said ByteDance currently plans to spend more than 56% (90 billion yuan) of total spending in 2025 on infrastructure needs such as computing power and data centers. While the report's authors did not specify how much money TikTok's parent company plans to invest specifically in artificial intelligence, they said ByteDance's spending on computing power “will drive the progress of China's artificial intelligence industry.”
They also point out that despite ByteDance's huge spending, China's spending on technology still lags far behind Western competitors such as Microsoft, whose total capital expenditures in 2024 will reach a staggering $44.5 billion.
Read the full report: South China Morning Post
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