• Surging chip prices, prolonged supply shortages have constrained expansion plans, sources say
• CPU market dominated by Intel, AMD but companies like Google, Amazon developing their own chips
• ByteDance looking at both Arm and RISC-V chip architecture, sources say

Chinese technology giant ByteDance is developing ​its own central processing units (CPUs) to support its growing AI infrastructure needs, three people familiar with the matter said, as ‌surging chip prices and prolonged supply shortages constrain its expansion plans.

The move underscores the industry's rapid shift toward "inference," where AI models are deployed to perform agentic tasks that demand more from CPUs, working in tandem with the graphics chips made by Nvidia that have dominated the AI boom.