Recently, ByteDance, the developer behind the short-form video service TikTok, recently announced that they will build a new data center in Southeast Asia, specifically Malaysia, which will be used for AI research purposes and also for users of their AI services in the region.
According to the Wall Street Journal, ByteDance will reportedly purchase 500 NVIDIA Blackwell computing systems (most likely NVIDIA DGX B200) consisting of 36 thousand NVIDIA B200 processing chips from Singapore-based cloud data center company Aolani Cloud.
Aolani Cloud will also reportedly purchase components to build this data center from another company called Aivres who will assemble these server machines, and all 500 computing systems powered by the latest Grace Blackwell AI processing chip will come with a value of $2.5 billion (~RM9.83 billion).
The report also said that ByteDance plans to use the computing power for research and development of AI technology outside of China, as well as to meet the growing AI demand from its customers around the world.
Exploration of the use of AI technology is also nothing new for ByteDance. The company has developed the Seedance 2.0 video-generating AI model, which has been seen to successfully generate many hyper-realistic videos. ByteDance also reportedly has several other AI applications such as Cici AI, Coze, ChitChop and BagelBell, which are powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT language model.
Regarding the issue of export controls and the use of AI processing technology by companies from outside the United States, Aolani Cloud has the advantage of being one of the international companies that follows the control instructions quite strictly. This is because although these components are used by Chinese companies such as ByteDance, the process of purchasing, installing and operating these server machines is controlled by Aolani Cloud, and is developed outside of China.
So far, it is not known when ByteDance or Aolani Cloud will start developing this data center capacity.
