ByteDance secures $29.6 billion mega loan to fund AI and data center expansion outside China

ByteDance has secured a $29.6 billion loan from nearly 30 banks, giving the TikTok owner one of Asia’s largest corporate financing packages this year as it pours more money into artificial intelligence and data center capacity outside China, Reuters reported Friday.

“ByteDance has secured ​a $29.6 billion loan from nearly 30 banks,” Reuters reported, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

“The loan is the second-largest made in Asia this year after SoftBank raised $40 billion in March to boost OpenAI investments, underscoring lenders’ enthusiasm for the sector which demands ever-increasing capital,” the report added.

According to the report, the three-year loan, coordinated by Citigroup and JPMorgan, drew participation from Chinese, U.S., European, and Singaporean banks, according to people familiar with the financing. ByteDance initially sought about $20 billion, but strong lender demand pushed the final size far higher.

The result is a financing package that says almost as much about banks’ appetite for AI exposure as it does about ByteDance’s spending plans.

Only SoftBank’s $40 billion financing in March, tied to its OpenAI investment ambitions, has been larger in Asia this year.

Chinese banks subscribed to more than 60% of ByteDance’s loan, one source said.

ByteDance told lenders it would use the money for general corporate purposes. People familiar with the deal said much of it is expected to support the company’s AI plans, including projects outside China.

That overseas angle matters.

ByteDance has become an offtaker for a number of data centers being built across Southeast Asia, meaning it commits to buying a set amount of computing capacity from those facilities. Those commitments can give developers the revenue certainty needed to finance and construct large data center projects.

For ByteDance, the capacity feeds a much bigger race.

The company is competing with Chinese technology groups in AI infrastructure and with global players in multimodal AI models, an area already attracting enormous capital commitments from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others.

“ByteDance is competing with local hyperscalers on AI data centers and with global hyperscalers on multimodal AI model,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, said.

“Both require massive investment, especially if we look at the Capex poured into AI training by the likes of OpenAI and Google,” he added.

A rare $29.6 billion bet on ByteDance’s credit

What makes the deal stand out is not just its size.

The dollar-denominated loan is unsecured, meaning ByteDance is not pledging shares, property, or other assets as collateral. For a financing package approaching $30 billion, that structure is unusual and signals how strongly lenders view the company’s ability to repay.

“It is very rare to see such a mega loan unsecured,” one source said. “The banks practically are counting purely on ByteDance’s name.”

That confidence comes at a moment when ByteDance is becoming more aggressive in AI infrastructure.

Reuters reported in June that the company was discussing purchases of AI inference chips from Shanghai-based Iluvatar CoreX and considering a similar arrangement with Baidu. Those efforts point to ByteDance building a broader supply network at a time when access to advanced AI chips remains one of the biggest constraints facing Chinese technology companies.

The loan gives ByteDance more room to secure compute, reserve data center capacity, and support AI products aimed at markets beyond China.

It is a much larger financing than ByteDance’s previous trip to the global loan market. In September 2024, the company raised $10.8 billion from about 20 international and Chinese lenders, Bloomberg reported.

Less than two years later, ByteDance has nearly tripled that figure.

The scale of the new loan shows how the AI race is moving beyond model development and into infrastructure finance. Training systems, running inference, securing chips, and reserving data center capacity all require billions of dollars long before the returns are guaranteed.

ByteDance now has nearly $30 billion more financial room to play that game.

And banks appear willing to bet that the TikTok owner can make those investments pay.

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