ByteDance Increases Capital Expenditure by 25% in 2026

According to the South China Morning Post, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has raised its capital expenditure plan for 2026 by 25% to more than $30 billion, due to its commitment to artificial intelligence and rising memory costs.

ByteDance once said at the end of 2025 that it planned to spend about $14 billion to buy NVIDIA GPUs in 2026. In December 2025, US President Donald Trump approved the sale of some advanced AI chips to China, including H200 GPU and AMD chips.

However, the Chinese government has not yet approved the import of these chips. On the contrary, Beijing is calling on Chinese companies to use more domestically produced chips. The report quoted two people familiar with the matter as saying that this prompted ByteDance to increase the budget for purchasing chips developed by Chinese companies.

ByteDance and Alibaba recently started testing AI chips developed by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Chinese technology companies plan to use Huawei’s new 950PR chip more widely, as it has better compatibility with Nvidia’s CUDA software system and faster response speed.

ByteDance is also expanding its AI infrastructure map. The company is investing $25 billion in Thailand to build data infrastructure and $1.2 billion in Finland to build a data center. ByteDance has also developed its own big language model, called Doubao.

Although ByteDance has given up most of its ownership in TikTok’s US business, it still retains 19.9% of its shares in a new joint venture, whose main investors include Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX.