China’s tech giant ByteDance is accelerating its push into custom AI chips. According to South China Morning Post, sources say the company aims to finalize the design of its next-generation in-house CPU by early 2027, with mass production and broader deployment targeted for the second half of the year.

An earlier version of the proprietary CPU has reportedly been in internal use since late 2025, with strong demand potentially bringing forward the tape-out of the new chip.

The reported development underscores ByteDance’s broader push into in-house silicon to support rising AI computing demand from products such as Doubao and Seedance. While the company has rapidly expanded its chip design efforts, it has yet to publicly disclose its progress, the report adds.

The initiative also comes as the role of high-performance CPUs is being re-evaluated in the era of agentic AI, with workloads evolving from pure matrix computation to more complex task orchestration, the report notes.

As ByteDance expands its in-house chip capabilities, Investing.com states that Arm, Intel, and AMD are among the suppliers the company could increasingly bypass.

Reuters also notes that ByteDance currently relies on CPUs from Intel and AMD, both of which have significantly raised prices in recent months, with quarter-over-quarter increases of 10% to as much as 35%.

Qualcomm Partnership and Supply Constraints

ByteDance is reportedly in discussions with U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm, which has been expanding its presence in AI data centers. As South China Morning Post notes, partnering with Qualcomm—which relies on foundries such as TSMC for manufacturing—could help ByteDance navigate an advanced chip supply chain constrained by bottlenecks spanning wafer fabrication to advanced packaging.

Last week, Qualcomm announced that Meta will adopt its Dragonfly C1000 data center CPU and disclosed that it is also developing custom silicon for two other unnamed hyperscalers, South China Morning Post adds. The company expects its data center chip business to generate US$5 billion in revenue in fiscal 2027, including US$1 billion from custom chip customers.

ByteDance Diversifies AI Chip Supply

Beyond its in-house CPU efforts, ByteDance and other leading Chinese cloud providers have increasingly turned to domestic AI chip suppliers amid the global supply crunch, including Biren Technology, MetaX, Iluvatar CoreX, Moore Threads, and Enflame Technology, as noted by South China Morning Post.

Reuters also reports, citing sources, that ByteDance is in discussions with Shanghai-based Iluvatar CoreX, one of China’s leading GPU startups, to acquire AI chips for inference workloads. Iluvatar CoreX is expected to supply at least 50,000 chips to ByteDance this year, while ByteDance is also evaluating a similar partnership with Baidu.

Read more

• [News] ByteDance Reportedly Develops In-House CPUs Amid Supply Tightness; Explores Both Arm and RISC-V
• [News] Qualcomm Reportedly Plans China AI Chip Push With Export-Control-Compliant Custom Chips

(Photo credit: ByteDance)