TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, is said to be working with Southeast Asian firm Aolani Cloud to deploy some 500 Nvidea Blackwell GPUs in Malaysia for AI research and development, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) citing people familiar with the matter.
The GPUs comprise 36,000 B200 chips said to be worth about US$ 2.5 billion, said the people.
Aolani will acquire the GPUs from Aivres which assembles servers using Nvidia chips. A spokesperson from Aolani said the company was currently operating hardware worth about US$ 100 million.
The strategic offshore deployment allows ByteDance to scale AI innovation while navigating regulatory constraints such as US export controls which restrict direct sales of high-end AI chips to China. This has forced Chinese companies to train AI models in Southeast Asian data centers which do not have such restrictions. The model inference can run later on locally made chips in China such as Huaweis’.
ByteDance derives a quarter of its revenue from outside China.
Best known as the creator of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, ByteDance competes directly with US tech giants like Google and OpenAI. It has created more than a dozen AI apps in China and parallel versions for overseas markets, such as chatbot Dola, video creator Dreamina and homework helper Gauth.
In recent months, ByteDance’s AI video-generation model, called Seedance, caught attention for its realistic movie scenes crafted from script prompts.