The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing sources, reported exclusively on the 12th that ByteDance Ltd., the parent company of TikTok, plans to use Nvidia's cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips in Malaysia.
According to WSJ, ByteDance Ltd. is pushing a plan to build computing power in Malaysia in partnership with Southeast Asian cloud provider Aolani Cloud by using about 500 Blackwell computing systems and about 36,000 B200 chips.
Aolani is a tier-1 cloud partner of Nvidia with priority access to next-generation chips. The company is said to have been leasing Malaysia-based AI servers equipped with Nvidia H100 chips to ByteDance Ltd. since Feb. last year.
ByteDance Ltd. is reportedly seeking to purchase servers from iBress, a Nvidia partner that assembles AI servers.
Since the U.S.-China trade conflict led to a ban on direct sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to Chinese corporations, Chinese corporations have sought ways to circumvent export controls.
ByteDance Ltd. intends to use the computing resources it has secured this time for AI research and development outside China and to meet growing AI demand from customers worldwide. ByteDance Ltd. has set a goal of becoming a global AI corporation on par with U.S. corporations such as Google and OpenAI.
The video-generation AI model "SeeDance 2.0" recently unveiled by ByteDance Ltd. stunned the global film industry by producing high-quality videos from simple prompts.
About a quarter of the company's revenue currently comes from outside China. ByteDance Ltd. has AI researchers and engineering teams in Singapore and the United States, who work with researchers in China on fundamental AI research.