ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, has earmarked over 150 billion yuan ($20.64 billion) in capital expenditure for this year, much of which will be centred on artificial intelligence, two people briefed on the matter said.

TikTok owner ByteDance on Wednesday released an update to its flagship AI model as a global race intensified to create AI models capable of tackling complex problems.

Founded just 20 months ago in Alibaba’s home city of Hangzhou, DeepSeek has upended the industry with its low-cost, high-performance AI models. The pressure is now on established players like Alibaba,

TikTok, owned by ByteDance, is on the verge of being banned in the United States. The thing is, the government also went after other ByteDance apps, and there are quite a few of them operating in the U.

DeepSeek is just one of many Chinese companies working on AI to make China the world leader in the field by 2030.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, has earmarked over 150 billion yuan ($20.64 billion) for capital expenditures in 2025, with a substantial portion of the funds being directed toward artificial intelligence,

ByteDance released Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgrade to its flagship AI model, which it claims outperforms OpenAI's o1 in AIME.

ByteDance has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered code editor in competition with American leaders like Cursor and Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, just after US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law requiring the company to divest TikTok.

Alibaba unveils Qwen 2.5 AI model, claiming it outperforms GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 as China’s AI race intensifies.

China seeks AI dominance, making significant investments and implementing safety and ethics regulations. Leading AI models include Alibaba's Qwen, Baidu's Ernie Bot, and ByteDance's Doubao.

Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, according to President Donald Trump. If that rings a bell it’s because Microsoft sought to buy the social media app in 2020, the last time Trump tried to ban the app.