$30 billion, or roughly RMB 200 billion, is now the number attached to ByteDance's 2026 AI infrastructure plan.
SCMP first reported the increase on May 9, and TechNode followed on May 11. The new plan is 25% higher than the RMB 160 billion budget set at the end of 2025. Adding RMB 40 billion in a single year effectively rewrites ByteDance's 2026 capex plan.
Placed next to global peers, the scale is clear:
| Company | 2026 AI / total capex | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | $200 billion | Includes AWS overall |
| $190 billion | ||
| Microsoft | $190 billion | |
| Meta | $145 billion midpoint | $115B-$135B range |
| ByteDance | $30 billion | AI infrastructure only |
| Alibaba | Not broken out | Estimated around $20 billion |
| Tencent | Not broken out | Estimated around $15 billion |
ByteDance's $30 billion sits in the same conversation as Meta's spending, even if the companies are not directly comparable. Meta's budget has to cover Reality Labs, Llama, ads systems and data centers. ByteDance's figure is for AI infrastructure alone, so the AI intensity is not small.
Where the extra money goes
The logic behind ByteDance's higher budget is different from the one driving Meta or Google.
For US companies, bigger plans usually mean more Nvidia GB300 capacity, more Blackwell supply and longer power contracts. ByteDance is being pushed by two different forces.
First, memory prices have surged.
Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are all facing tight supply for HBM3E and HBM4. Micron just reported a quarter with revenue up 38%, while its share price has risen 47% over the past year. Spot prices for HBM memory have more than doubled from early 2024.
At ByteDance's cluster scale, memory alone can consume tens of billions of yuan. This is inflation the company has to absorb: without the higher spend, the parts simply do not arrive.
Second, the domestic-chip share is rising.
That is the active choice inside this budget revision. The key line is that the share allocated to domestic AI chips will increase further.
- Huawei Ascend 950: ByteDance is one of the core customers.
- Cambricon Siyuan: already connected into Volcano Engine.
- Moore Threads and Enflame: second-line supply-chain backups.
- Nvidia H20, the compliant version: still in use, but with a smaller share.
The US approved H200 exports to China last month, but China has not yet cleared imports. Beijing's position is to build domestic alternatives first, then consider opening the door. Even if ByteDance wanted to buy more, the supply path is constrained, which speeds up domestic procurement.
ByteDance's AI portfolio
Many observers still see ByteDance's AI business as Doubao, the largest consumer AI product in China. That is true, but it is not the whole story.
Doubao: China's top AI chat product by monthly active users, fed by Bilibili, Douyin and TikTok traffic, with estimated MAU above 500 million. Daily token processing is about 1.4 trillion, based on ByteDance's own disclosures.
Volcano Engine: the company's enterprise AI cloud business, spanning model APIs and agent platforms, with one of the fastest revenue growth rates in the sector over the past six months.
Seedance: a newly released video-generation model, among the most realistic open or semi-open video AI systems, and backed by the resources of TikTok's parent company.
All three lines burn money and compute. ByteDance does not have Microsoft's Azure base or Google's in-house TPU stack. It has to buy and build almost everything. The $30 billion budget is not generous; it is necessary.
The decoupling math
ByteDance's 2026 number belongs inside a larger Chinese AI spending picture.
Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu and Huawei together are likely to spend about $100 billion to $120 billion on AI capex in 2026. That is still six to seven times smaller than the roughly $700 billion expected from US Big Tech.
But the structure matters more than the headline gap:
- US spending: more than 80% goes to Nvidia hardware, power and data centers.
- China spending: 30% to 50% goes to domestic chips, with the rest going to cloud, power and model training.
Domestic chips are the part of China's AI capex that can circulate back into the local stack. Money paid to Huawei and Cambricon also subsidizes the chip supply chain. Each budget line buys compute and supports suppliers.
ByteDance's 25% increase pushes that logic further. The next question is whether Alibaba and Tencent follow by raising 2026 capex. If they do not, ByteDance may take share. If they do, China's AI capex could exceed RMB 1 trillion in 2026.
The second-half earnings season will make the answer clearer.
Sources: ByteDance Targets 25% Rise in AI Infrastructure Spending (Bloomberg/SCMP), CocoLoop, ByteDance boosts AI infrastructure spending by 25% to $28 billion this year (TechNode), ByteDance raises 2026 capex by at least 25% amid AI boom (South China Morning Post)