TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly developing its own custom AI CPUs in a bid to reduce its reliance on US chipmakers. Per a Reuters report, ByteDance's new chip is inspired by Groq's "language processing units," a fancy term for a chip optimized for inference tasks — running AI models instead of training them. The move comes in a context where inference-heavy agentic AI is quickly becoming the new normal. The project is seemingly in the concept and design stage, with Reuters' sources claiming that ByteDance is evaluating both Arm and RISC-V designs.

Additionally, The Information claims ByteDance is partnering with Chinese startup InnoStar Semiconductor for memory technology related to the project, potentially obviating the need to acquire rare and expensive HBM chips from Samsung and the like. The Chinese startup got investments from ByteDance and Alibaba, China's cloud and e-commerce giant.

However, ByteDance doesn't appear to have its own chip design teams, and will purportedly rely on "several external partners", who are expected to also take care of the actual silicon manufacturing. The firm's CPU project takes place against a geopolitical tussle that got China's government banning the purchase of Nvidia H200 Blackwell chips, after the Trump administration backtracked on its technological export controls.

This is hardly ByteDance's first rodeo with investing in its own technology, too, as it started designing its own SeedChip AI accelerator with TSMC back in 2024, a silicon slab expected to tape out and be mass-produced this year still. For now, the expectation is that ByteDance will use hybrid architectures for its servers as dependence on Nvidia is still an unfortunate necessity, but over time, it wouldn't be surprising to see the firm waving goodbye to the back of Jensen Huang's leather jacket.

Furthermore, much like any other advanced chip vendor these days, Intel and AMD reportedly keep increasing prices every quarter as they hold the lion's share of the CPU market. Nvidia's recently unveiled Vera chips show great promise, but once again, we're talking about a U.S. firm. Although Bytedance is best known for TikTok, the world's leading short-form video app, the company runs China's AI chatbot app Doubao and has a handful of AI models under its belt.

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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.