China's ByteDance to Spend $22 Billion on Tech in 2025

Chinese technology giant ByteDance is planning to invest as much as $22 billion (160 billion yuan) in technologies next year, with a majority of the funds headed to artificial intelligence-related infrastructure, the South China Morning Post reported.

The outlay will be twice ByteDance’s $11 billion investment in 2024, which was the highest capital spending by a Chinese technology firm for the year, and will almost match the combined spending of rivals Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, the SCMP said, citing research from Chinese brokerage Zheshang Securities.

Zheshang researchers noted that ByteDance’s large capex spending had yielded results, with its AI chatbot Doubao becoming the most popular AI chatbot in China. The chatbot also cost less and was on par with OpenAI’s GPT-40, researchers said, according to SCMP.

The researchers noted that Doubao’s success was partly due the model being free to use for the public. That had allowed the chatbot to gain nearly 60 million monthly active users as of November, which, in turn, gave the model access to a significant amount of training data.

ByteDance now plans to spend more than 56% of its total outlay for 2025 — 90 billion yuan — on computing power and infrastructure needs such as data centres, Zheshang researchers said. While the report’s authors did not lay out how much the TikTok parent planned to spend specifically on AI, they said ByteDance’s spending on computing power “will drive progress in China’s AI industry”.

They also noted that despite ByteDance’s big outlays, Chinese spending on technology remained far behind Western rivals like Microsoft, whose capital expenditure totalled an eye-watering $44.5 billion in 2024.

Read the full report: The South China Morning Post

Vishakha Saxena

Vishakha Saxena

Vishakha Saxena is the Multimedia and Social Media Editor at Asia Financial. She has worked as a digital journalist since 2013, and is an experienced writer and multimedia producer. As a trader and investor, she is keenly interested in new economy, emerging markets and the intersections of finance and society. You can write to her at [email protected]