ByteDance plans to ramp this year’s capital expenditure to a record high of $70 billion, and is planning next year’s billion-level “foundation battle”

ME AI News, according to Beating monitoring and observation, ByteDance plans to raise this year’s capital expenditure to as much as 70 billion USD to expand its AI infrastructure. The new budget is nearly double last year’s figure—about 25 billion USD—while the specific spending is approximately 4000 billion to 5000 billion RMB (about 59 billion to 74 billion USD). This investment will be supported by profits of about 50 billion USD in 2025. If the business environment is favorable, next year’s spending may further rise to 1000 billion USD.

ByteDance’s scale of expansion far exceeds that of domestic peers. By comparison, domestic tech giants are relatively more restrained in their investment in AI infrastructure. Tencent’s 2025 capital expenditure is 792 billion RMB, and it has pledged to double its AI investment this year to more than 360 billion RMB. Alibaba’s capital expenditure for the fiscal year as of this March is 1260 billion RMB, and it is currently maintaining a rolling three-year investment target of more than 500 billion USD. ByteDance’s annual plan has already surpassed its domestic rivals by several times in total.

Constrained by export controls on high-end chips, low-cost operations locally have become ByteDance’s unique advantage. China’s data center construction and operating costs are far lower than those in the United States, allowing it to purchase the same amount of infrastructure capacity with less capital. This year, the combined capital expenditure of the four hyperscale cloud providers—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta—reaches as high as 7250 billion USD, averaging 1810 billion USD per company. ByteDance is diversifying to supplement its computing power. Recently, it has reached procurement agreements with Qualcomm for millions of custom ASIC chips to support the Doubao large-model ecosystem with more than 300 million monthly active users, as well as foundational video and text model ecosystems such as Seedance.

At present, ByteDance is consolidating business lines to focus on AI R&D. Over the past year, the company has spun off non-core businesses such as games, and concentrated its funding to push AI and social platforms to the forefront. In the latest round of equity transactions, ByteDance’s valuation is about 5500 billion USD. Although the expenditure budget will be adjusted each quarter, and the final spending will depend on the availability of computing hardware and power supply, ByteDance’s acceleration in large models, commercialization, and procurement of underlying hardware demonstrates its determination to secure leadership in computing power and in the dominance of intelligent agents.

(Source: BlockBeats)