ByteDance seeks $20 billion offshore loan for AI spending

ByteDance is in preliminary talks with banks for about $20 billion in offshore borrowing, a deal that would be its largest ever and one of the clearest signs yet of how expensive the AI race has become. The proposed facility would be new money, not a refinancing, with a three-year tenor and an option to extend it to five years.

The size of the request points to a company trying to keep pace on several fronts at once: data centers, advanced chips, chip design and the networking layers that support AI training and inference. ByteDance already raised $10.8 billion in 2024 in a global loan that, at the time, was the largest-ever dollar-denominated corporate facility in Asia excluding Japan and involved more than 20 lenders. This latest round would go materially further, giving the TikTok owner more room to fund capital spending without turning immediately to equity markets.

The borrowing plan lands as ByteDance’s AI bill keeps climbing. Bloomberg reporting in May said the company was weighing capital expenditures of as much as $70 billion in 2026 for AI data centers and infrastructure. Separate reporting said ByteDance planned to spend about 100 billion yuan, or roughly $14 billion, on Nvidia chips in 2026, up from about 85 billion yuan in 2025. Together, those figures show a company moving from software-led growth toward infrastructure-heavy investment on a scale more familiar to industrial groups than internet platforms.

ByteDance is also widening its supplier base. Qualcomm is in talks to provide chip-design services to ByteDance, while ByteDance has also been in discussions with Shanghai-based Iluvatar CoreX to buy AI inference chips and has considered Baidu as a possible supplier. That diversification matters as U.S. export controls complicate access to advanced semiconductors and raise the stakes for Chinese technology firms trying to secure long-term supply.

The push is already showing up in ByteDance’s products. The company launched paid subscriptions for its Doubao AI chatbot on June 24, and Doubao has been reported to have more than 300 million monthly active users, making it one of China’s most widely used AI applications. For ByteDance, the loan would buy time and flexibility, but it would also increase scrutiny over leverage, repayment capacity and how fast AI spending can turn into durable returns.