ByteDance is in talks to buy artificial-intelligence chips from Iluvatar CoreX, a Shanghai-based GPU maker that until recently sold almost entirely to government buyers, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Reuters. The talks point to how far the owner of TikTok and Douyin is willing to go to lessen its dependence on Nvidia.
Iluvatar CoreX is expected to ship at least 50,000 chips to ByteDance this year, the sources said, most of them destined for inference work rather than training. Inference, the business of answering user queries once a model is built, is the less hardware-hungry half of the AI workload, and it is where Chinese designers have the better chance of matching imported silicon. ByteDance wants the capacity to widen the user base of Doubao, its consumer chatbot.
Should a deal be agreed, Iluvatar would become ByteDance’s third major domestic GPU supplier, after Huawei and Cambricon. The company is also weighing a separate purchase of Baidu’s Kunlunxin chips, the same people said, which would give it a fourth.
The arithmetic of the deal is striking against Iluvatar’s size. The company, which listed in Hong Kong in January, reported revenue of 1 billion yuan, about $148m, for 2025, roughly 90% of it from selling GPUs.
A 50,000-chip order from a single buyer the scale of ByteDance would be a different order of business entirely, and a notable shift for a supplier whose sales have so far leaned on state procurement.
The talks sit inside a wider effort across Chinese technology to build alternatives to Nvidia, whose most advanced chips remain subject to US export controls. Iluvatar’s flagship TianGai-100 line is pitched as a competitor to Nvidia’s A100 and A800 parts. Whether it performs at that level in production, across a customer running services at ByteDance’s scale, is the question the order would answer.
Until now, Iluvatar has sold mainly into government procurement projects, which makes a commercial order at this scale a meaningful change in its customer mix as well as its revenue.
A buyer the size of ByteDance brings the kind of demanding, high-volume workload that tends to expose whatever a chip cannot yet do, and a supplier’s ability to meet it is part of what such a deal would prove. The reported 50,000-chip figure is described as an expectation for the year rather than a signed commitment.
The split between inference and training matters to how far the shift can go. ByteDance is reported to be sourcing the parts for inference, the lighter workload, while the most demanding training runs still lean on the most powerful accelerators, where Chinese designers have further to travel. A domestic supplier handling inference at scale would still leave the harder half of the problem partly dependent on imported silicon.
The details are not final and remain subject to change, the sources cautioned. ByteDance and Iluvatar CoreX have not commented publicly on the discussions. What is clear is the direction of travel: a company that built its products on imported accelerators is now shopping for them at home.
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