How Tiktok’s parent, byteance, became a powerhouse ai

The Chinese giant byTedance has made some of the world’s most popular applications: Tiktok and, in China, Douyin and Toutiao.

In the United States, Tiktok claims 170 million users. But in China, about 700 million use the domestic version, Douyin, and 300 million move to Toutiao titles, a news application. Each video that byTedance users watch or post give the company another data point on how people use the internet. For years, ByTedance has applied that the wealth of information to make its applications more attractive, improving its ability to suggest content to keep users hooked.

ByTedance also uses data as the Linchpin of a growing business in artificial intelligence. The company has invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure required to supply AI systems, manufacturing huge data centers in China and Southeast Asia and the purchase of advanced semiconductor. ByTedance is also found in an AI intake spree.

ByTedance is best known outside China for Tiktok, an application so popular that at least 20 governments have adopted some bans on concerns about its influence on national security and public opinion.

Concern about how byTedance uses data has led to Washington’s legislators to try to force Tiktok’s US businesses. On Friday, President Trump expanded an imminent deadline by 75 days in mid -June.

But in China all this data helped ByTedance expand its activities far beyond social media and gain an advantage in the world race to build advanced AI technology.

“ByTedance has all this data, all the time, by millions of users,” said Wei Sun, an artificial intelligence analyst at Counterpoint Research in Beijing.

Beijing officials have pushed China technology companies to rotate from entertainment applications to what the government considers as an existential objective: confidence in cutting -edge technologies that also have military applications, such as semiconductors, supercomputers and artificial intelligence.

ByTedance has embraced this mission. Last year, the company spent about $ 11 billion on infrastructure such as data centers, networking equipment and computer chips, according to a report by Zheshang Securities, a Chinese financial company.

Biden’s administration created rules to try to keep Chinese companies to access such brands, especially those of Nvidia, the Silicon Valley giant. But byTedance has found ways to get the computational power it needs to train its systems – in part using data centers outside China and most likely, analysts say, buying chips from Chinese chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon.

While these Chinese brands cannot do what NVIDIA chips can do, they work well enough to help companies such as ByTedance provide AI services to people and businesses in China. Chinese technology companies are “encouraged to adopt local options” for the chip market, said Lian Jye Su, an analyst of Omdia, a market research company.

All of these costs helped ByTedance make one of the most popular artificial intelligence applications in China. Chatbot, Doubao, has won 60 million users within its first three months on the market last year. It was China’s most popular chatbot, striking her opponents by Baidu and Moonshot supported by Alibaba until the Deepseek Deepseek this year was released.

ByTedance showed how closely its application ecosystem is to AI’s efforts when it has recently begun to allow some users to chat with Doubao in the Douyin application.

In 2021, ByTedance launched the Volcano Engine, a business that allows other companies to pay to use the technologies made by Tiktok, Douyin and Toutiao as addictive as the information tools and the video analysis tools and algorithms.

Some of these services were natural technology applications developed byTedance for Douyin and Tiktok, such as filters that can make people look much larger or exceed hearts on their faces. ByTedance used its experience by making these filters to help companies such as Haier and Hisense to develop traffic monitoring technology for devices that control the gesture such as smart TVs.

GAC, one of China’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers, uses Volcano Engine to translate and manage data for cars sold outside China. And Mercedes-Benz said last year that it would use the Volcano Engine in the voice system and the navigation system in the car and the navigation system in China.

ByTedance did not respond to a request for comments.

The company’s work publications show that ByTedance is recruiting hundreds of roles related to the AI. The company recently called on its engineering team to focus on a milestone that technology companies such as Openai, Google and Deepseek are also hunting – making an AI system that is as clever as smarter than people, often referred to as artificial intelligence.

While many Chinese companies have started AI projects, a much smaller number has resources to invest in staff and the computing power required to promote technology. Some experts expect a research team somewhere in the world will make this type of system within the following year or two.

Claire fu He contributed to Seoul research.