The Tiktok logo is displayed on a smartphone with the name of the owner bytedance in the background. Investors hold the Potential of AI of Bytedance.
Jonathan Raa / Nurphoto via Getty Images
The co -founder of Bytedance, Zhang Yiming, has become the richest man in China, investors betting on companies with AI potential. Zhang’s fortune increased to $ 65.5 billion, ahead of the $ 56.5 billion from the Berde Giant Nongfu drinks, Zhong Shanshan, according to forbes estimates.
Zhang, 41, derives its net value from a 21% participation in the private technology giant, although he resigned from his post as president in 2021 after resigning as general manager that year.
In secondary markets, bytedance’s evaluation varies from $ 240 billion to more than $ 400 billion, which is what some of its main investors, especially Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group believe that Tiktok’s parent is worth. Forbes thinks that the company has an assessment of $ 312 billion, based on a recent Action buyout program as well as conversations with analysts and a separate bydance investor who prefers not to be appointed.
This amount marks a leap of more than 40% compared to 2024, when certain private market investors were only willing to acquire Bytedance shares at a price that would suggest an assessment of $ 217 billion. The company has obtained a rear wind from the improvement of Tiktok’s situation in the United States, after President Donald Trump said that he would “probably” extend the deadline for April 5 for the popular short video platform to be sold or prohibited, said Glen Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Rain Maker Securities based in the United States.
Asset said On Sunday, he negotiated with various American buyers for participation in Tiktok, and an agreement could come soon.
Meanwhile, investors have become optimistic about the prospects of large technological companies in the country, including Bytedance. They are encouraged by the more friendly position of the government towards private sector companies and the country’s advances despite American attempts to thwart them with export controls. The Hang Seng Tech index, which follows the performance of companies such as Alibaba and Tencent, has climbed 80% in the last 12 months.
“All the active ingredients of Chinese technology have staged a large rebound off the bass base,” said Charlie Chai, analyst based in Shanghai at the 86research research firm, by WeChat.
For its part, Bytedance saw its Doubao chatbot becoming the second most popular IA chatbot in the world by monthly active users (maus).
Propelled by its own large language model (LLM), the free product had 82 million mau in February. According to AICPB.com, a website based in Hunan, the Chatgpt, which was n ° 1. The chatbot of the Chinese IA company Deepseek, which shocked the Silicon Valley with its release in January of a very profitable model, ranked n ° 4 with 62 million mau.
A Bytedance spokesperson refused to comment. Although he is no longer involved in the company’s daily operations, Zhang still plays a key role in his AI strategy, according to the media.
The reclusive billionaire encouraged an intense accent on AI, with the ultimate aim of achieving artificial general intelligence (AG), or AI which corresponds or exceeds human intelligence, according to News affiliated by the State. He launched the hiring by Bytedance of the Talents linked to the AI, reported the newspaper. Zhang would have accepted an annual salary of more than 10 million yuan (1.4 million dollars) to poach an engineer from a higher IA of a rival, according to Local media reports.
Bytedance also reserved 40 billion yuan ($ 5.5 billion) for the purchase of AI fleas in China in 2025 and $ 6.8 billion for having invested in infrastructures related to AI abroad, according to A financial report which has cited anonymous sources. Last year, the company spent $ 8 billion on servers related to AI, equipment that supports IA’s computer needs, according to a Mars research report from Cinda Securities, based in Beijing.
But the chai of 86research warns that competition in AI is increasingly reduced in China. Bytedance operates several popular social media platforms, including the sister application of Tiktok Douyin, which helped the company promote its Doubao chatbot. But with regard to AI models that feed these services, it is the Chinese electronic commerce giant Alibaba who “leads competition,” says Chai. Last week, Alibaba released Its latest AI model, QWQ-32B, which has improved performance and reasoning capacities and does not require so much data to train, depending on the company.
Another model of the Chinese electronic commerce giant Qwen2.5-Max is the ninth most popular IA model in the world by User votes, according to Chatbot Arena, a classification platform developed by researchers, notably from the University of California in Berkeley. According to Chatbot Arena, the DEEPSEEK R1 model kept deprived. Bytedance products are not in the top ten.
“Although chatbots provide a practical interface oriented towards consumers to present the power of AI to the public, what really matters are the back-end models, which should be evaluated more rigorously in terms of performance and costs,” explains Chai by WeChat. Alibaba’s is the first choice of the research company according to these criteria, he said.
