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Sources: in recent months, Tencent aggressively hired AI researchers from ByteDance, including offering to double their salaries, and reorganized its AI team (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tencent-poaches-bytedance-…

Tencent Poaches ByteDance Researchers as China AI Race Heats Up
Throughout the past couple of years, as AI fever swept China’s technology sector, one giant—Tencent—seemed to mostly be sitting on the sidelines. The company, which owns the hugely popular WeChat app, didn’t seem enthusiastic to win a fierce race in the country to develop cutting-edge AI models, ...

Users of ByteDance's agentic AI phone Nubia M153 report that its Doubao assistant is blocked or limited by Tencent's WeChat, Alibaba's Taobao, and other apps (Cissy Zhou/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/techn

ByteDance AI phone sparks security fears from Tencent and Alibaba
Experts say bigger concern is TikTok parent trying to rewrite Big Tech market rules

Sources: ByteDance and Alibaba have asked Nvidia about placing large orders for H200 chips after Trump's export approval, as they remain concerned about supply (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-tra

Leicht, kompakt, mit 4K-Displays: Pico plant für 2026 eine Premium-VR-Brille
Pico will sich mit einem Premium-Headset neu am Markt positionieren. Ein ByteDance-Manager soll erste technische Details zum Gerät ausgeplaudert haben.

Sources: ByteDance plans to spend about $14B on Nvidia's AI chips in 2026, an increase of about 18% from 2025 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3338191/bytedance-pour-u…

Exclusive | ByteDance to pour US$14 billion into Nvidia chips in 2026 as AI demand surges
Chinese unicorn’s computing needs have climbed across its portfolio of popular apps, cloud unit Volcano Engine and large language models.

ByteDance's Cici, an overseas counterpart of China's most popular AI chatbot app Doubao, is quietly gaining traction in the UK, Mexico, and Southeast Asia (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/bytedances-ai-chatbot-is-quietly-ga…

ByteDance’s Other AI Chatbot Is Quietly Gaining Traction Around the World
ByteDance is paying for ads and partnering with influencers to promote its AI chatbot app Cici in countries like the UK, Mexico, and Indonesia.

A look at ByteDance's Doubao, which became China's most popular AI app in August, with over 157M MAUs, thanks in part to its deep integration with Douyin (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/bytedance-doubao-chatbot-popularity/

How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot
An AI chatbot developed by TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is now more popular than DeepSeek. The feat proves that user-friendly design often matters more than having the most advanced AI model.

ByteDance launches an AI voice assistant powered by its Doubao LLM, available first on ZTE's Nubia M153 smartphone prototype; Doubao has an estimated 159M MAUs (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/bytedance-rolls-out-ai-…

Sources: Chinese investment firm Capital Today bought ByteDance shares at a $480B valuation after a bidding war; ByteDance had a $330B valuation in September (Dong Cao/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-20…

Sources: ByteDance bought more Nvidia chips than any other Chinese company in 2025, but Chinese regulators now block it from using the chips in new data centers (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-slowly-surely-breaking-…

China Is Slowly but Surely Breaking Free From Nvidia
ByteDance bought more Nvidia chips than any other Chinese company in 2025, according to three people with direct knowledge of its purchases. Racing to secure computing power for its billion-plus users and fearing Washington might suddenly cut off supply, the TikTok parent hoarded its stock of ...