Bytedance secures access to Nvidia Blackwell cluster in Malaysia, circumventing US export ban on China

TikTok's parent company plans to use around 36,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips in Malaysia, according to a Wall Street Journal report. US export controls prevent direct access in China. Even the Trump administration's recent relaxations explicitly exclude these very chips.

Bytedance is building computing capacity with Nvidia's most powerful AI chips outside of China, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The TikTok parent company is reportedly working with Southeast Asian firm Aolani Cloud on plans for around 500 Nvidia Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia, totaling approximately 36,000 B200 chips. The hardware costs would likely exceed $2.5 billion, according to the WSJ's sources.

Bytedance plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside China, as well as to meet rising AI demand from its global customers, according to the report. The company already generates about a quarter of its revenue outside China and maintains sizable AI teams in Singapore, San Jose, and Seattle.

Aolani Cloud was set up in late 2023 by a group of investors, including Singapore-based venture-capital firm K3 Ventures, with a holding company in the Cayman Islands. The company is a tier-1 cloud partner of Nvidia and has been leasing servers with Nvidia's H100 chips to Bytedance in Malaysia since February 2025. An Nvidia spokesman told the WSJ that "by design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated outside controlled countries" such as China. Aolani said it "adheres fully to all applicable export control regulations" and that its customers do not own the chips or have claims over them.

Malaysia: from smuggling hub to legal training ground

Malaysia has been a flashpoint in the chip conflict between the US and China for months. The country has become one of the fastest-growing data center markets globally. As early as March 2025, the US demanded close monitoring of every shipment of high-end Nvidia chips to Malaysia, suspecting that chips were being smuggled through the country to China. Nine people were arrested in Singapore in connection with the scheme. In July 2025, Malaysia introduced a permit requirement for US high-performance chips to prevent their physical transfer onward.

Those concerns proved justified in late 2025, when The Information reported that Deepseek was using thousands of smuggled Nvidia Blackwell chips for its AI training. The chips had been physically shipped from Southeast Asian data centers into China.

Bytedance is now apparently choosing a different path: the chips stay in Malaysia, and the computing power is used on-site. This is precisely the scenario that alarmed Washington back in 2024, when the Emirati AI company G42 was forced by the US government to divest its stakes in Chinese firms, including Bytedance, in order to keep its access to Nvidia chips and secure a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft. The fear at the time: Chinese companies could gain access to sanctioned hardware through third parties, even if that hardware never touches Chinese soil.

Blackwell chips remain off-limits for China

The Blackwell chips at the center of this deal are explicitly excluded even from recent relaxations. In January 2026, China approved the import of more than 400,000 Nvidia H200 chips for Bytedance, Alibaba, and Tencent. However, the significantly more powerful Blackwell processors remain expressly banned for export to China. In November 2025, Washington even blocked Nvidia's attempt to ship a stripped-down B30A chip as a throttled Blackwell variant to China.

ByteDance aims to challenge Google and OpenAI globally

Bytedance already operates more than a dozen AI apps, according to the WSJ, including chatbot Dola, video creator Dreamina, and its video-generation model Seedance. Five of the world's 50 most popular AI consumer apps come from Bytedance, according to a January ranking by Andreessen Horowitz.

The WSJ had previously reported that Bytedance was also in talks to use more than 7,000 B200 chips at a data center in Indonesia. In January, Bytedance gave up control of TikTok's US operations to investors considered friendly to the US in an effort to ease geopolitical tensions.