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"science and technology innovation board daily" september 18 (reporter zhang yangyang) in response to today's media reports that bytedance plans to cooperate with tsmc on ai chips, bytedance responded to the science and technology innovation board daily and said:the report is untrue. bytedance does have some exploration in the chip field, but it is still in the early stages., mainly focusing on cost optimization of recommendation, advertising and other businesses, and all projects are fully compliant with relevant trade control regulations.

since 2022, there have been constant rumors in the market that bytedance is making chips. although the company has made clarifications many times, it is an indisputable fact that bytedance continues to invest in the chip field.

as early as 2018, bytedance vice president yang zhenyuan revealed to the media that it would take action in the chip field. "bytedance has the largest number of user-uploaded videos in the world that need to be analyzed and processed, and has a large amount of chip procurement and application. it is also actively seeking breakthroughs in chip-related fields," yang zhen said at the time.

it was not until the second half of 2020 that bytedance officially began to form a chip team, but the staff was streamlined. in 2021, the chip team began to expand rapidly. it was also in this year that bytedance officially disclosed the establishment of a team and the exploration of ai chip business.

if you enter the keyword "chip" on bytedance's recruitment website, there are already more than 200 positions, including positions in ai chip architecture, packaging design, etc.

in order to support their services, online platform companies need a large number of server chips to build the necessary infrastructure. especially in the face of high-load application scenarios such as large-scale online streaming data transmission, video encoding and decoding, and cloud inference acceleration, companies must continue to purchase a large number of server chips to ensure that their data centers distributed around the world can operate smoothly.

this demand has led to huge orders, attracting industry giants such as qualcomm and intel.at the same time, this has also driven some online service providers to consider developing their own server chips as a second option.

although bytedance has always emphasized the importance of algorithms rather than computing power, as it operates huge video businesses such as douyin and tiktok, bytedance has to pay attention to its own chips: this can not only reduce costs, but also promote the optimized integration between hardware and bytedance's software services, and make it more flexible in supply chain management.

however, compared with the chip teams of alibaba, huawei and other manufacturers with a team size of thousands of people, bytedance's chip team will only have about 300 people by 2023. an employee of volcano engine told the reporter of "science and technology innovation board daily" that if you don't pay close attention, it's even difficult to find such a business team.

this difference in scale also allows bytedance's chips to be controlled within the scope of "self-production and self-sales", designed according to its own needs, and better control costs.

bytedance rarely discloses any progress related to its self-developed chips. the last time it introduced related progress in public was in 2023, when volcano engine video cloud officially announced that its self-developed video codec chip had been released, and made it clear that bytedance's self-developed chips mainly serve video businesses such as douyin and xigua video, and will be open to corporate customers through volcano engine video cloud.