ByteDance developing custom CPU chips to support AI rollout, sources say

Beijing/Paris: Chinese technology giant ByteDance is developing its own central processing units (CPUs) to support its growing AI infrastructure needs, ⁠three people familiar with the matter said, as surging chip prices and prolonged supply shortages constrain its expansion plans.

The move underscores ⁠the industry's rapid shift toward "inference," where AI models are deployed to perform agentic tasks that ‌demand more from CPUs, working in tandem ​with the graphics chips made by Nvidia that have dominated the AI boom.

The shift has created a shortage of CPUs in recent months, and global hyperscalers including Alphabet's Google, Amazon and Microsoft are also developing their own custom CPUs to reduce costs and tailor performance to their specific workloads. It has also helped major CPU makers Intel and AMD emerge as leading challengers to Nvidia's AI dominance.

ByteDance, ​the parent of short video platform TikTok, ⁠is targeting deployment of its proprietary CPU in its own servers and data centres to support internal operations, as it prepares a massive rollout of agent-based products including its Coze platform, the first source said.

The Beijing-based company has approached several external partners to assist with the effort, and those partners are expected to contribute not only to the ⁠chip's design work ‌but also to help secure manufacturing capacity at foundries, the sources added. The project remains at an early stage, the first source said.

They declined to be named, as the plan is not ‌public.

ByteDance did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.

CPU Shortage

ByteDance's move places it alongside a growing cohort of tech companies that have concluded the ⁠economics of custom chips outweigh the complexity of designing them.

It is pursuing two chip architecture tracks for its CPU development — one based on SoftBank-owned Arm and another on the open-source ‌RISC-V instruction set architecture, as it weighs which design best suits its long-term data centre requirements, the ‌sources said.

Developing two designs simultaneously is a common hedge for technology giants, as it allows them ‌to test their options before committing to a costly, large-scale manufacturing run.

Arm did not respond immediately to a ‌request for comment.

The push to develop proprietary silicon comes as Intel has warned Chinese customers of server CPU delivery lead times of up to six months, Reuters reported in February.

Intel said last month that demand for its CPU from AI firms was so strong in the ⁠first quarter that ⁠it sold even chips it had originally written off.

AMD CEO Lisa Su warned last week that the global CPU market is "tight," with demand outpacing forecasts and supply constraints expected to persist.

ByteDance currently sources CPUs from Intel and AMD, and they have raised prices significantly, with quarter-over-quarter increases ranging from 10% to as much as 35% in recent months, two of the sources said, prompting ByteDance to accelerate its push for in-house alternatives.

Intel said it had updated prices on some of its products to reflect sustained demand, increased component and material costs and evolving market dynamics. AMD did not respond immediately ​to a request for comment.

Nvidia is expanding beyond GPUs into the CPU market, and its CEO Jensen Huang hopes ​its new "Vera" central processors will give the firm access ​to a new $200 billion market.

It unveiled a new central processor and AI system built on technology from Groq - a chip startup specialising in inference - in ​March, making moves to defend its position in the AI chip market.