H200 imports have not yet been released, and ByteDance's over 200 billion AI infrastructure budget is significantly favoring domestic chips.

According to Dongcha Beating Monitoring, ByteDance plans to raise its artificial intelligence capital expenditure to more than 200 billion RMB this year, an increase of over 25% compared with the initial budget of 160 billion RMB discussed at the end of last year. According to a report by the South China Morning Post, this budget is being significantly directed toward domestically produced AI chips.

The direct reasons for the budget increase are rising costs of memory chips and the expansion of its AI business. In terms of the structure of computing power procurement, one key background is that although the U.S. government has approved NVIDIA to export H200 chips to China, China’s regulatory authorities have not yet cleared domestic companies to import them.

To mitigate geopolitical risks and respond to policy calls, increasing purchases of domestically produced chips has become a pragmatic choice. Meanwhile, ByteDance’s overseas intelligent computing layout is also accelerating rapidly. This week, the Thai government approved ByteDance’s data infrastructure investment proposal of up to $25 billion, far exceeding its initially set $8.8 billion five-year plan; last month, the company also announced an additional €1 billion investment in data centers in Finland.

As a reference for overall scale, last year the combined AI capital expenditure of all Chinese internet giants was about 400 billion RMB, while this year the budget for just Google or Microsoft alone is already around $190 billion.