ByteDance to Develop New AI Model With Huawei Chips

Chinese company ByteDance, Tiktok’s parent company, is planning on developing an AI model supported by AI chips developed by regional company Huawei Technologies.

According to a recent exclusive by Reuters, three sources familiar with the matter confirmed that ByteDance opted for this alternative as the United States makes it difficult for American companies to sell AI chips to the Chinese market with strict export rules—even though it was recently revealed that Nvidia was working on AI chips exclusively for Chinese companies.

“ByteDance’s next step in the AI race is to use Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train a large-language AI model,” said anonymous sources to Reuters.

According to the information shared with Reuters, ByteDance is already using the chips Ascend 910B—the company ordered 100,000 this year, but these are being delivered at a slow pace—with pre-trained AI models for tasks like making predictions. To train new AI models, high-performance AI chips and large amounts of data are required.

ByteDance’s current AI model, Doubao, is less powerful than the new one the Chinese company is allegedly developing.

However, a spokesperson from Tiktok in the United States, Michael Hughes, denied the information provided by the anonymous sources. “The entire premise here is wrong. No new model is being developed,” said Hughes to Reuters.

ByteDance has recently launched a new AI tool to generate videos from text prompts called Jimeng AI.