Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to provide chip design services to ByteDance, the parent company of social media platform TikTok.
People familiar with the matter told Reuters that the talks are ongoing as Qualcomm seeks to reduce its dependence on the smartphone market, which is currently its largest source of revenue.
The technology company is reportedly discussing the design of custom chips for ByteDance, according to Reuters’ sources, and would be based in part on technology owned by AlphaWave Semi.
It has previously been reported that ByteDance is developing its own AI chips for inference tasks and custom CPUs.
If the talks with Qualcomm are successful, they would make ByteDance an early customer of Qualcomm’s chip design services operations. The US company announced its re-entry into the global chip market last year, returning to CPUs to diversify its offerings and be less reliant on one area of its business.
In October last year, it launched the Qualcomm AI200 and AI250, its next-generation AI inference-optimised solutions for data centres. Both solutions were tailored to enable fast Gen AI inference at high performance per dollar per watt.
The reports also come as ByteDance emerges as a significant AI infrastructure spender. Bloomberg News reported recently that ByteDance is in early talks with banks for its largest offshore loan of roughly US$20 billion.
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