ByteDance’s big AI leap

Hi, I’m?Azeem Azhar. As a global expert on exponential technologies, I advise governments, some of the world’s largest firms, and investors on how to make sense of our exponential future. ?Every week, I share insider's perspective to help you make sense of the exponential age.

?? Thanks to our sponsor Fin, a?breakthrough AI bot by Intercom, ready to join your support team.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok,?has ordered 100,000 GPU chips, worth $1bn, in 2023 from Nvidia. This is a massive commitment to building out an AI infrastructure, representing the entire market for GPUs in China last year. It is sufficient to build one of the largest private AI clouds in the world.

To put this into perspective, Meta uses 16,000 A100 Nvidia GPUs, although with every hyperscaler and many governments rushing to build more and more powerful infrastructure, this is likely out of date. Just this week the US Department of Energy hit a milestone with?its 63,000 GPU Aurora?supercomputer capable of a theoretical 2 exaflops (2 x 10^18 operations per second) performance.?Tesla is building its own AI supercomputer, targeting 100 exaflops, a task that would require 300,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs.

ByteDance’s order is split between A100 chips (ordered before the US government told Nvidia to?stop selling its top-performing HPC cards to China, in August 2022) and?H800?cards. The H800 is a?Hopper-based custom accelerator Nvidia built to comply with export restrictions?— an attenuated version of its H100 accelerator. So while powerful, this would represent a lower performance system than Tesla’s ambitions.

Back in 2016, I remember talking to a semiconductor exec who said that his firm’s modelling implied a nine-order-of-magnitude increase in the demand for compute cycles over the coming 5-10 years. We’re well into that territory now.

?? Today’s edition is supported by our partner,?Fin.

Fin can’t burn its mouth on hot pizza. Or wave at someone who wasn’t waving at them. Fin can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. Meet Fin. A?breakthrough AI bot by Intercom?– ready to join your support team today.?

Start free trial today