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.
