ByteDance Negotiates MediaTek AI Chip Purchase for Data Centers

ByteDance is reportedly negotiating to buy artificial intelligence chips from MediaTek for its data centers, as the TikTok parent seeks alternatives to restricted Nvidia GPUs. Crypto Briefing reported the talks, and no agreement or terms have been confirmed.

ByteDance's MediaTek Talks and Nvidia's Role

ByteDance has been diversifying where its AI chips come from, driven by US export restrictions that limit its access to advanced Nvidia GPUs, the processors that power most large-scale AI training and inference. In June 2026, ByteDance was in talks for 50,000 AI chips from Chinese vendor Iluvatar CoreX, mainly to support its Doubao AI assistant. In May 2026, Qualcomm was reported to have signed a deal with ByteDance for millions of ASICs aimed at AI workloads.

MediaTek is best known for mobile SoCs and has been pushing beyond phones into custom AI chips for data centers. In August or September 2026, Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek to deepen their collaboration on AI chip technology. A central piece of that work is NVLink Fusion, which is designed to let custom chips plug into Nvidia's high-speed connection infrastructure, allowing companies to mix specialized silicon with Nvidia's systems. MediaTek has set a target of $2 billion in AI ASIC revenue for 2026, backed by a dedicated AI data center of its own powered by Nvidia Blackwell chips.

ByteDance's AI Infrastructure Spending

ByteDance's AI infrastructure capital expenditure guidance stands at a range of 160 to 200 billion yuan in 2026, with half potentially going toward processors, according to akta.pro company records. The company agreed in June 2026 to source millions of custom AI ASICs from Qualcomm for data centers, converting in-house chip designs into production silicon with mass production targeted for late 2026. ByteDance's Doubao model family processes 180 trillion daily token calls, a 1,500x increase from launch two years ago.

Earlier ByteDance AI Moves

ByteDance's TRAE merged TraeWork and TraeCode into one app with Agent and IDE modes, announced October 9, with TraeWork shutting down October 23, Pandaily reported. ByteDance's Doubao AI assistant launched as a native app on Huawei's HarmonyOS PCs on October 8, shipping with Doubao-Seed-2.1 Pro and Turbo models, Pandaily reported. ByteDance holds about one-fifth of China's data center capacity, which totals over 24GW with a 20GW pipeline, Datacenterdynamics reported on October 6.

MediaTek's AI Chip Ambitions

MediaTek's target of $2 billion in AI ASIC revenue for 2026 is backed by a dedicated AI data center powered by Nvidia Blackwell chips. Nvidia's $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek, made in August or September 2026, deepened their collaboration on AI chip technology. Any potential arrangement between ByteDance and MediaTek would have to navigate the same export-control environment that pushed ByteDance to diversify.