ByteDance Reportedly In Talks With Samsung to Develop Custom AI Chip Codenamed "SeedChip"

The trade tensions between the U.S. and China have resulted in Chinese tech giants becoming self-sufficient, especially when we talk about AI. For months, NVIDIA has been trapped in the middle of this chaos, with the Trump administration asking the AI giant to cut exports of its H200 AI chips to China.

While that situation has improved over time, China remains quite skeptical, considering tech giants in the country are trying their best to establish themselves in their homeland. ByteDance is among them, which isn’t quite sitting still in the ongoing AI arms race.

The TikTok parent is now reportedly developing its own AI chip. That’s according to Reuters, which reported that ByteDance is in talks with Samsung to manufacture the processor, with sample chips expected by the end of March. The chip, internally codenamed SeedChip, is said to focus on AI inference tasks, the kind of workloads that power real-world apps like chatbots and recommendation engines, rather than model training.

Per the news agency, ByteDance plans to manufacture at least 100,000 units this year, with plans to scale output toward 350,000 units over time. Negotiations with Samsung are also said to include access to memory supplies, which have been a major concern across the tech industry amid the global AI infrastructure boom.

Although there’s no word from either company, it seems ByteDance, like many other Chinese tech giants, is looking to become less reliant on NVIDIA’s supremacy. Although China has been cautious about the import of H200 AI chips, it recently greenlighted DeepSeek to import the advanced chips with unspecified conditions.

Speaking of conditions, the U.S. has also eased exports of NVIDIA’s high-end chips, but not without a catch. Last month, the same news outlet reported that the U.S. is seeking at least a 25% cut from each sale.