ByteDance’s net profit fell less than 10% to $20B over the first six months of 2026 as it poured money into AI, even though revenue climbed about 30% to $120B, according to Jing Yang and Juro Osawa at The Information. TikTok’s international ad and e-commerce sales drove part of that growth, and revenue from outside China, most of it TikTok’s, topped 30% of ByteDance’s total, up from 25% in 2024. ByteDance trains its own AI models and is building a chip to run them, and the roughly $30B it recently borrowed from banks could help pay for that work. Its revenue grew at the same pace as Meta’s over the first half, yet ByteDance is valued at about $630B on secondary markets while Meta is worth $1.7T.
