The purchase of the Blackwell GPUs of Nvidia by the Chinese engineering company, ByteDance, is a calculated move that somehow gets around United States export restrictions and thus supports a significant growth of the AI infrastructure in Malaysia. This effort emphasizes the aggressive stance of Chinese technology conglomerates, which are aggressively trying to ensure the momentum of operations amid growing tougher international controls.
Mega Cluster
In a business alliance with Southeast Asian start up Aolani Cloud, ByteDance plans to set up 500 systems based in Blackwell, each with 36,000 B200 chips. It will cost almost US $2.5 billion and is expected to exceed the current hardware portfolio by Avines, approximated about 100 million, resulting in the acquisition of hardware.
The B200 cores are bringing 20 x FP4 AI compute 20,000 cores and 192GB of HBM3e memory 200 supporting 8 TB/s of memory bandwidth computing, which is 5 fold on critical workloads compared to the previous H100 architecture. This group will address the growing global AI demands of ByteDance, including model training for downstream, customer service business beyond China.
Export Maze
The transaction acquires particular importance against the background of the US and China conflict in the sphere of technology. In late February, the Trump administration was deliberating on fully licensing H200 chips to Byte Dance under a conditional arrangement, which would have required the company to share 25% of revenue, a move that Nvidia refused to consent to which further portrayed the straining relations. Although China has temporarily suspended the sale of Nvidia chips to new data centers within China in order to encourage the sales of domestic substitutes. The ByteDance has proceeded to seek overseas acquisitions. According to one Nvidia spokesperson in a recent commentary, the regulatory environment is effectively eliminating the capabilities of the premier GPUs of Nvidia to compete in the domestic market.