TikTok parent company ByteDance is developing not one but two new AI GPUs that are reportedly being made on TSMC 5nm process node, and will enter mass production in 2026.
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The information is coming from The Information, where according to their sources ByteDance will reduce its reliance on NVIDIA for its AI hardware, all the while staying in the lines of US export regulations. ByteDance’s new AI GPUs are in the design phase, with one of them being for AI training and the other for AI inference.
ByteDance’s new AI GPUs are said to be made on TSMC 4N/5N process nodes, which is similar to the 4NP process node that TSMC uses to make NVIDIA’s new Blackwell AI GPUs. The TikTok parent company reportedly spent over $2 billion buying over 200,000+ NVIDIA H20 AI GPUs (which cost around $10,000 per H20 AI GPU) this year alone, with many of the AI GPUs not yet delivered by NVIDIA.
The shortage of NVIDIA AI GPUs and their higher price tags are some of the reasons ByteDance has decided to make its own AI hardware, even with NVIDIA tweaking the DGX H20 and other AI GPUs specifically for the Chinese market, after US export controls continued getting tightened.
NVIDIA’s DGX H20 AI GPU features only 296 INT8/FP8 TOPS/TFLOPS and 148 BF16/FP16 TFLOPS performance for AI computations, meanwhile the full H100 AI GPU features 3,958 INT8/FP8 TOPS/TFLOPS as well as 1,979 BF16/FP16 TFLOPS performance for AI… over 10x the performance.
But, the DGX H20 has 96GB of HBM3 memory with up to 4.0TB/sec of memory bandwidth and 8-way GPU support, so it’s a popular AI GPU offer in China… but ByteDance wants more performance, and to not have to deal with NVIDIA anymore it seems (even after spending billions on NVIDIA AI hardware).
However, ByteDance might be developing its own AI hardware, but right now… right now it depends on NVIDIA CUDA and supporting software stack for its AI training and inference. ByteDance will have to build its own software platform and working software stack is fully compatible with its brand-new hardware.