TechFlow News, May 28: According to a Reuters report, sources familiar with the matter stated that ByteDance is developing its own CPU to meet its rapidly growing artificial intelligence infrastructure needs. Soaring chip prices and persistent long-term supply shortages are currently constraining the company’s expansion plans. This move underscores the industry’s accelerating shift toward the “inference” phase—a stage that significantly increases demand for CPUs and has recently triggered CPU shortages.
Sources indicated that ByteDance plans to deploy its in-house CPUs across its own servers and data centers to support internal operations, while also preparing for the large-scale rollout of agent-based products, including its Coze platform. ByteDance is currently pursuing two CPU architecture paths in parallel: one based on the Arm architecture and another based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, to assess which design better suits its long-term data center requirements.
ByteDance currently procures CPUs from Intel and AMD—both of which have raised prices substantially over the past few months, with quarterly sequential increases ranging from 10% to 35%, prompting ByteDance to accelerate development of its internal alternative solutions.
