ByteDance is Microsoft’s biggest AI customer, even as Washington treats Chinese AI as a threat
ByteDance has generally been Microsoft’s single biggest AI customer in recent years, and it is on track to spend more than $1bn a year on Microsoft’s AI and cloud services, Bloomberg reports.
The striking part is what the TikTok owner is mostly buying: OpenAI models, sold through Microsoft’s Azure cloud, in a market that OpenAI itself will not serve directly.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic decline to sell their models to companies in China, citing fears of intellectual-property theft and harmful use. Microsoft, thanks to its unusual partnership with OpenAI, sets its own China policy and sells the GPT series there anyway. It offers other models too, though not Anthropic’s.
ByteDance is not alone. Ant Group, Meituan, and Tencent are also significant buyers of AI models through Azure, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
The fastest-growing AI market Microsoft has
Internally, Microsoft has treated this as a win rather than a liability.
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