China's ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports

March 12 (Reuters) - TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, is assembling computing power with top Nvidia chips outside China to drive its artificial intelligence efforts globally, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

 

ByteDance is working with Southeast Asian firm Aolani Cloud to deploy about 500 Nvidia Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia, totaling roughly 36,000 B200 chips, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The hardware build-out would likely cost more than $2.5 billion, the WSJ reported, adding that Aolani currently operates with about $100 million worth of hardware.

 

ByteDance plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside China and to meet growing global demand for AI from its customers, according to the report.

 

"By design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries. Winning the business of those clouds will bring tens of billions of dollars and high paying jobs home," according to an Nvidia spokesperson.

The spokesperson also said in a statement that all of the company’s cloud partners go through reviews by its teams before they are approved to receive the company’s products.

 

An Aolani spokesperson told Reuters that the company adheres fully to all applicable export control regulations and aims to provide cloud-computing services to multiple companies across Asia and globally.

 

ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment.

Last month, Reuters reported that the United States is willing to allow ByteDance to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips, but the chipmaker has not agreed to proposed conditions for their use, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

(Reporting by Shivani Tanna and Angela Christy in Bengaluru; Editing by Sumana Nandy and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)