ByteDance reportedly in talks to buy MediaTek AI chips for data centers

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 fo...