ByteDance has secured a $29.6 billion syndicated loan from nearly 30 banks, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday, as lenders crowd into financing for the TikTok and Douyin owner’s AI expansion. Bloomberg first reported the facility earlier in the week. Citigroup and JPMorgan are coordinating the three-year dollar loan, which can extend to five years, and it has not yet been signed while banks confirm allocations.
The company started with a $20 billion target and raised the size after orders topped $30 billion, the people said. SoftBank’s $40 billion March bridge for its OpenAI stake remains Asia’s larger 2026 dollar loan; ByteDance now takes second. Pricing is also tighter than ByteDance’s last offshore borrow: an opening margin of about 68 basis points over SOFR, down from 85 basis points on its 2024 facility, according to reporting that tracked the terms.
Officially the proceeds are for general corporate purposes. People briefed on the talks say the money is mainly meant to support AI plans, including data-center and compute buildout. Bloomberg and later coverage have said ByteDance is weighing 2026 capital spending of as much as $70 billion on AI infrastructure, a figure that remains preliminary and sits above earlier yuan-denominated planning ranges. The company has not publicly confirmed either the loan or the capex scenario.
The raise lands under export-control pressure. US rules constrain ByteDance’s access to the most advanced Nvidia chips, so a larger domestic and custom-silicon stack costs more for the same compute. The company has also been paying more than $1 billion a year to run OpenAI models through Microsoft Azure while it finances hardware meant to reduce that dependence, according to secondary reporting of the financing context.
Unsecured and oversubscribed, the facility is a credit signal as much as a balance-sheet event: international banks are underwriting a privately held Chinese tech giant’s AI scale-up even as geopolitics around TikTok and chips stays unresolved. What is signed, and how much of the cash actually turns into racks and wafers, is the next wire.