Chinese tech giant ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has invested heavily in cloud-based access to Nvidia GPUs to circumvent US sanctions that prevent it from directly purchasing high-performance processors used in AI. It is reported that they are planning.
information report China's ByteDance has reportedly secured a staggering $7 billion budget to rent Nvidia GPUs through cloud services in countries outside the United States. The move is part of the company's broader $20 billion investment plan in its AI infrastructure, which also includes data centers and undersea cables.
The U.S. government has imposed restrictions on Chinese companies, including ByteDance, by banning them from purchasing cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs and installing them in data centers in China. But TikTok's parent company discovered a loophole that allowed it to access these powerful processors by renting them from cloud service providers in other countries, including the Middle East and Asia.
ByteDance denies the report, but industry experts say that if the company actually invests $7 billion in cloud access to Nvidia GPUs, it would become one of the world's largest consumers of AI hardware. It suggests that. The report estimates that by paying about $1.30 per hour for on-demand access to Nvidia's H100 GPUs, ByteDance could potentially rent a cluster of 614,682 H100 GPUs running 24 hours a day for a year. I am.
However, it is unclear whether there will be enough H100 GPUs available for rent in the Middle East and Asia to meet ByteDance's needs, and it is unclear whether the company will need that many processors for its current AI projects. is. ByteDance's largest known AI project is the Doubao AI chatbot with 51 million active users.
Another possibility is that ByteDance could source Nvidia's reduced H20 HGX and B20 GPUs and continue to run them in its own data centers in China, in addition to renting processors from cloud providers. The company has reportedly already spent more than $2 billion on more than 200,000 Nvidia H20 GPUs by 2024.
In an effort to reduce dependence on Nvidia, ByteDance is also rumored to be working with Broadcom to develop its own AI processor. The company is said to be working on two chips, one for training and one for inference, which will be manufactured by TSMC using N4/N5 process technology. Mass production of these chips is scheduled to begin in 2026.
ByteDance may not be able to develop a GPU that significantly outperforms Nvidia's HGX H20 due to U.S. export control regulations, but developing its own processor could be a more cost-effective solution for the company in the long run. There is a possibility that
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship issues.
