ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is reportedly in talks with Iluvatar CoreX and Baidu Inc. to acquire AI chips. Iluvatar CoreX is projected to deliver at least 50,000 chips to ByteDance this year, primarily for AI inference tasks, as the company broadens the user base of its Doubao chatbot. If the deal goes through, Iluvatar CoreX would become ByteDance’s third major domestic GPU supplier, following Huawei and Cambricon, according to a Reuters report on Monday. This development comes after a report in March suggested that ByteDance planned a major AI infrastructure expansion in Malaysia, involving deploying around 36,000 of Nvidia Corp.’s B200 AI chips through cloud provider Aolani Cloud, with hardware costs potentially exceeding $2.5 billion. Amid Beijing’s push, Chinese GPU and AI chip manufacturers claimed nearly 41% of the domestic AI accelerator server market last year. Meanwhile, according to a Reuters report on Friday, Nvidia has started marketing its new Vera AI data-center CPU to Chinese customers, with orders now open and availability expected as early as August.