ByteDance's capital expenditure this year is expected to soar to a record high of $70 billion, with plans to engage in a billion-dollar-level infrastructure battle next year.
According to DeepInsight monitoring, ByteDance plans to increase its capital expenditure this year to a record high of $70 billion to expand its AI infrastructure. The new budget is nearly double the approximately $25 billion spent last year, with specific expenses ranging from about 400 billion to 500 billion Chinese Yuan (approximately $59 billion to $74 billion). This investment will be supported by around $50 billion in profits by 2025. If the business environment remains favorable, next year's spending may further increase to $100 billion.
ByteDance's expansion scale far exceeds that of its domestic peers. In contrast, domestic tech giants have been more restrained in their investment in AI infrastructure. Tencent's 2025 capital expenditure is 79.2 billion Chinese Yuan, with a commitment to double this year's AI investment to over 36 billion Yuan. Alibaba's capital expenditure for the fiscal year ending March this year was 126 billion Yuan, currently maintaining a three-year rolling investment target of over $50 billion. ByteDance's single-year plan has already surpassed the total of domestic competitors by several times.
Constrained by high-end chip export controls, domestic low-cost has become ByteDance's unique advantage. The cost of building and operating data centers in China is much lower than in the United States, allowing for the purchase of an equivalent amount of infrastructure capacity with lower funds. The total capital expenditure of the four major hyperscale cloud vendors—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta—is as high as $725 billion this year, averaging $181 billion per company. ByteDance is diversifying its computing power, recently reaching a multi-million chip procurement agreement with Qualcomm to support large-scale models such as those with over 300 million monthly active users and underlying video and text models like Seedance.
Currently, ByteDance is consolidating its business lines to focus on AI research and development. Over the past year, the company has divested non-core businesses such as gaming and concentrated its funds on promoting AI and its social ecosystem. In the latest round of equity transactions, ByteDance is valued at around $550 billion. Although the spending budget will be adjusted quarterly and the final expenditure will depend on the supply of computing hardware and electricity, ByteDance's acceleration in large-scale model development, commercialization, and underlying hardware procurement demonstrates its determination to seek dominance in computing power and intelligent entities.
