ByteDance has had enough of waiting months for processors, so it's going to make them itself

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and video editing app CapCut, is developing its own CPUs in a bid to better support its AI infrastructure. Given the AI industry’s hunger for silicon, it’s hardly surprising another massive tech company is taking hardware into its own hands.

Several external partners have already been approached with regard to design work for ByteDance’s chip. Securing capacity at manufacturing foundries was apparently also discussed. The plan is in the early stages and not yet public, but Reuters spoke with a number of anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

Currently, ByteDance is exploring two different chip architectures: Arm and RISC-V. Both architectures are used for chips in data centres throughout the wider industry, though Arm presents a proprietary ISA, with a fixed feature set to go along with it, whereas RISC-V is a modular, royalty-free, open-source architecture. I can imagine not having to pay Arm’s licensing fees may be especially appealing to any major player looking to make their own chips.

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There’s been a lot of excitement about Arm chips in the realm of PC gaming, especially as the hardware team waits for even a whisper of news about Nvidia’s still-yet-to-be-announced N1X Arm chip (various reports have insisted it’s coming at some point this year). As for the alternate, open-source architecture…well, a few years back someone built a fully compliant RISC-V computer inside Terraria—and then they played Pong on it.

As the AI industry reaches towards CPU-intensive ‘inference’, ByteDance’s planned chip is intended to be deployed throughout its AI data centres and servers. This, in turn, will support ByteDance’s agentic AI products, such as the company’s development platform, Coze.

CPU pins

Reuters reported earlier this year that Intel had warned its Chinese customers that orders for processors could take six months to fulfil. The same report claims AMD was looking at 10-week delivery times in the same market, and ByteDance currently sources its CPUs from these two partners.

With that in mind, alongside the knock-on effects of the memory supply crisis, it’s unsurprising ByteDance would take the route of making its own hardware. It’s not the only company to go this way, either, with Google announcing its own Arm-based CPU all the way back in 2024. Microsoft, too, is moving towards designing more custom silicon for its own data centres, and so is Amazon.