ByteDance is reportedly negotiating to buy AI chips from MediaTek for use in its data centers. Neither the talks nor any terms have been confirmed, and no confirmed reports of the negotiations had surfaced as of mid-October 2026.
The TikTok parent has been actively diversifying where its AI chips come from. The driver is US export restrictions that limit its access to advanced Nvidia GPUs, the processors that power most large-scale AI training and inference.
In June 2026, ByteDance was in talks for 50,000 AI chips from Chinese vendor Iluvatar CoreX, mainly to support its Doubao AI assistant.
In May 2026, Qualcomm was reported to have signed a deal with ByteDance for millions of ASICs aimed at AI workloads.
The scale of ByteDance’s spending explains the appetite. The company has raised its AI infrastructure capital expenditure guidance to a range of 160 to 200 billion yuan in 2026, with half potentially going toward processors.
ByteDance’s investments have also left it in control of approximately one-fifth of China’s data-center capacity.
MediaTek’s pivot from phones to servers
MediaTek is best known for mobile SoCs. The company has been pushing beyond phones into custom AI chips for data centers.
In August or September 2026, Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in MediaTek to deepen their collaboration on AI chip technology. A central piece of that work is NVLink Fusion, which is designed to let custom chips plug into Nvidia’s high-speed connection infrastructure, allowing companies to mix specialized silicon with Nvidia’s systems.
MediaTek has set a target of $2 billion in AI ASIC revenue for 2026, backed by a dedicated AI data center of its own powered by Nvidia Blackwell chips.
Why this matters
For ByteDance, a company planning to spend up to 200 billion yuan on AI infrastructure in a single year, spreading orders across Iluvatar CoreX, Qualcomm and possibly MediaTek reduces the risk that a single policy change or supply shortage stalls its AI plans.
The arrangement carries some irony for Nvidia. Export rules limit what advanced GPUs Nvidia can sell to ByteDance, yet Nvidia has $3.5 billion invested in MediaTek, a company that may end up supplying ByteDance with custom chips built to work alongside Nvidia-designed infrastructure.
There are real caveats. No agreement between ByteDance and MediaTek has been confirmed, and any potential arrangement would have to navigate the same export-control environment that pushed ByteDance to diversify in the first place.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.