Qualcomm has reached an agreement to supply millions of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to ByteDance for use in AI data centers, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The chips are intended to underpin ByteDance’s AI agent software, and the deal also extends to chip manufacturing services — with Qualcomm helping ByteDance move a proprietary chip design the Chinese company has already completed through the production process. Neither company commented; Qualcomm’s representatives declined, and ByteDance did not respond to inquiries. Qualcomm shares surged as much as 8.3% on the news, hitting a new intraday record.
ByteDance is set to become one of Qualcomm’s earliest high-profile customers for AI-focused ASICs, a product line central to the chipmaker’s push beyond its smartphone-processor roots and into data center infrastructure — a market long dominated by Nvidia, with Broadcom and Marvell as the established challengers. At an earnings call last month, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlined a three-part roadmap covering custom ASICs, inference accelerators, and CPUs. The deal is reported to fall within current U.S. export control boundaries; fabrication partners such as TSMC would face no regulatory exposure as long as the chips remain within permitted computing performance limits under rules restricting advanced AI chip sales to Chinese buyers.