ByteDance is reportedly planning a $12 billion investment in AI chips by 2025, focusing on both domestic and overseas markets. The move aims to bolster its AI infrastructure amidst increasing U.S. pressure over TikTok’s ownership. However, ByteDance has denied the specifics of the report, calling it inaccurate.

TikTok parent ByteDance is ramping up its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, with plans to spend over $12 billion in 2025, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous sources. The Chinese tech giant is expected to allocate 40 billion yuan ($5.50 billion) to acquire AI chips within China and an additional $6.8 billion for overseas investments, using advanced Nvidia chips to enhance its foundation model training capabilities.

ByteDance’s spokesperson, however, disputed the report, stating, “The anonymously sourced information about our plan is incorrect.” Nvidia declined to comment on the matter.

The report also highlights that 60% of ByteDance’s domestic semiconductor orders are projected to go to Chinese suppliers, including Huawei and Cambricon, while the remainder would be spent on Nvidia chips adjusted to comply with U.S. export restrictions. Beijing has reportedly advised Chinese tech companies to source at least 30% of their chips from local suppliers to support domestic industries.

The development comes as ByteDance faces mounting regulatory pressure from the United States to divest its ownership of TikTok, amid national security concerns over the app’s ties to China. On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order delaying the ban on TikTok, which was originally set to take effect on January 19.

With ByteDance’s valuation reportedly hitting $300 billion, its ambitious plans for AI investment signal a push to strengthen its technological dominance, even as geopolitical tensions threaten to impact its global operations.

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The company’s gaming and real estate operations, as well as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok with approximately 600 million daily users, have also implemented the employment layoffs. According to a report in the South China Morning Post on Tuesday, hundreds of staff from various departments will be let go by Bytedance, the Chinese business that owns the video app TikTok, at the end of 2022 as a cost-cutting move.

According to the individuals, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not permitted to speak to the media, the decision has had an impact on the staff at Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok with 600 million daily active users, as well as its gaming and real estate operations.

With over 100,000 people worldwide and being one of the biggest employers in China’s tech sector, the job losses only account for a small portion of ByteDance’s workforce. Since ByteDance is a privately held company, it is not required to make information about its operations public.

In an effort to find the source of a damaging leak, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, confessed this week that a small number of its employees, some of whom were based in China, improperly accessed the TikTok data of American users and two journalists.

In a memo to staff members that Bloomberg claims to have seen, TikTok CEO Shou Chew apparently acknowledged the overreach. The allegations come after a lengthy internal probe at the business that was sparked by a Forbes report earlier this year that alleged the business intended to use the TikTok app to track the locations of specific U.S. users.

According to ByteDance’s inquiry this week, a number of employees had access to ID addresses and other personal information from a couple of reporters for BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times as well as an undetermined number of US users they were in contact with. According to reports, those leaker hunters were trying to determine whether the targeted users were close to ByteDance staff. Those endeavours were unsuccessful.

After telling staff in December that the company needed to “get fit and bulk up the muscle” to streamline operations, CEO Liang Rubo announced the layoffs.

In China’s tech sector, job layoffs are typically made in the name of company optimization, and firing underachievers is a frequent practise. In 2022, thousands of jobs will be lost at other Chinese digital powerhouses including Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding.

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A lawsuit has been filed against TikTok and its parent firm ByteDance over the death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly attempted a blackout challenge she saw on the app. Nylah Anderson was discovered unresponsive in her Pennsylvania bedroom on December 7th. She died five days after being in paediatric intensive care.

Tawainna, Nylah’s mother, stated her daughter tried the “blackout challenge.” People are encouraged to hold their breath or otherwise suffocate themselves until they pass out in this challenge. “The TikTok defendants’ algorithm judged that the deadly blackout challenge was well-tailored and likely to be of interest to 10-year-old Nylah Anderson, and she died as a result,” according to the complaint.

Furthermore, this challenge resulted in the deaths of several other children. Joshua Haileyesus, a 12-year-old Colorado kid, died in April 2021 after undertaking this task. In Italy, a girl died after undertaking the challenge. TikTok was also temporarily restricted for people who could not prove their age.

In March, it was revealed that a group of attorneys general were looking into TikTok’s app and “what TikTok knew about such damages” because of the possible harms it can cause to children. TikTok has yet to make a statement about the complaint.

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Duke University in North Carolina has begun offering TikTok lessons to help students advertise their brands.

In Durham, North Carolina, the institution provides a full-credit course called ‘Building Global Audiences,’ which teaches undergraduate students how to improve their social media usage and visibility. Students that took the programme have accumulated 145,000 followers and over 80 million views.

Natalia Hauser, a sophomore in the class, has roughly 12,000 followers on Instagram. Her TikTok account makes anything from $1,000 to $7,000 each month in brand collaborations. Hauser said the training helped her learn how to negotiate with businesses and how much she should charge for her work. She told  in a statement:

People don’t seem to realise how wealthy this profession is. It requires a great deal of discussion and commerce. Professor Aaron Dinin, who teaches the TikTok class, has a Ph.D. in English and has worked in the IT industry. The social marketing lecturer had to persuade Duke administration members to offer such a course.

According to Dinin, older generations believe that becoming an influencer is a shallow Gen Z thing. However, these media channels are simply the way the world works. There are several business opportunities and a large geographic reach.

Students in the TikTok class, who collectively have almost 600,000 followers, compare metrics and goals for their accounts and debate why some postings do better than others. Assignments and assignments include creating a similar video utilising a TikTok trend as inspiration and sharing the finished result with classmates.

Students can either film their films during class or spend time reaching out to brands. Some have even found work as a result of their online presence. Because of his expertise in developing a personal brand, one of the students, Ben Chipman, just obtained an internship at LinkedIn in New York. According to Chipman, To acquire a job in places and positions that interest me, I need a social media presence. It’s assumed that I’ll have something to show for myself.

More colleges are recognising the digital age’s trends and offering seminars to assist students develop their own brands. Such institutions strive to remain relevant in an era where a TikTok account is valued more than a degree by some. The Annenberg School at the University of Southern California and the University of Virginia, in addition to Duke University, offer similar courses.

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According to research firm Insider Intelligence, TikTok’s ad revenue is expected to triple to more than $11 billion in 2022, surpassing the combined sales of its rivals Twitter Inc and Snap Inc.

With over 1 billion active users, TikTok, which is owned by Chinese startup ByteDance, is one of the most popular social media apps in the world.
“Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson noted that TikTok’s user base has skyrocketed in the last couple of years, and the amount of time people spend on the app is astonishing.”

In 2022, Twitter and Snapchat are estimated to produce $5.58 billion and $4.86 billion in advertising income, respectively, which is still less than TikTok’s projected $11 billion.

Despite legal concerns about user data from the United States being sent on to China, the United States is estimated to account for about $6 billion, or more than half, of this year’s ad revenue.

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Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) announced TikTok, the leading destination for short-form videos, as a sponsor for the ODI series and one-off Twenty20I being played as part of the historic tour of Australia to Pakistan.

TikTok will be the presenting sponsor for the three-match ODI series, which will commence at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore from March 29, and associate sponsor for the T20I game. The sponsorship comes after the title sponsorship of the Test series. Earlier, TikTok was also announced as the entertainment partner of Pakistan Super League 7 and 8 and the title sponsor of the PSL anthem for the latest season.

The PCB, who are now also officially on TikTok, have entertained cricket fans on the platform throughout the partnership by sharing the highlights of the current and previous matches, fans reactions, favourite moments and exciting challenges. Cricket fans in Pakistan were able to engage with the PCB and their favourite cricketers like never before on TikTok.

TikTok, with more than 1 billion monthly active users around the world, provides a place where cricket fans can follow their favourite cricket content creators, share the best TikTok cricket content, and create their own special moments, reactions, and celebrations around this historic series with Australia.

Paul Katrib, Head of Brand Marketing, Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan at TikTok:

“We are delighted to continue our strong association with the most popular sport in Pakistan. Being part of this historic Pakistan-Australia Test series first and now the ODIs and T20I has made TikTok the ultimate platform for cricket fandom in Pakistan. With all the content posted during the PSL and the Test series, TikTok has become a place where people entertain themselves with the exciting cricket content that exists on the platform.”

The second and third match of the ODI series that is part of the inaugural 2020–2023 ICC Cricket World Cup Super League, will be played on March 31 and April 2 respectively, while the T20I will be played on April 5 at the same venue.

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Although the Sindh High Court ordered a nationwide ban on TikTok, the platform rejected the ban because Pakistan has a large fan base.

More importantly, many companies use the platform to market and sell products online. This is the third time that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has had to ban the application and take back the platform due to “immoral content”.

However, most people in the country, mainly conservatives, said that the platform promotes vulgar and LGBTQ content. In addition, the platform recently deleted more than 6 million unethical content videos from Pakistan, leading to the concept of the authorities banning the app, which was later revoked on Friday.

Since you have no permanent decision about the life of the platform, this has become a daily affair. Even Fawad Chaudhry, the Minister of Information, expressed the following in a recent tweet: “I am confused after reading the sentence regarding the suspension of TikTok.”

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The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has taken action to prohibit users from uploading and promoting vulgar videos on TikTok.

When sharing details with the Peshawar High Court Bank headed by Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan, the PTA technical director said that so far, it has deleted 9.8 million videos containing indecent content and blocked 720,000 accounts.

For the first time, Pakistan appoints a person to manage content. Prior to this, the social media authorities did not take any action against any obscene content.

The President of the Peshawar High Court, Qaiser Rashid Khan, has agreed that PTA will continue to take action against uploading unethical videos on this application.

The Chief Justice also stated that the authorities did not want to shut down the video-sharing platform. However, obscene and immoral content has a more serious impact on young people’s thinking, and immediate action must be taken to filter it.

The PTA authorities clarified that they have blocked all major websites containing obscene content in Pakistan.

However, in this case, there is still some work to be done. Now, users are careful when uploading content to this video-sharing platform, because PTA is cracking down on such videos and accounts.

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President Joe Biden on Wednesday revoked the previous administration’s administrative orders on TikTok and WeChat.

His predecessor, Donald Trump, targeted Chinese-owned apps last August, calling their widespread use a “national emergency”.

According to the new order signed by Biden, the U.S. Department of Commerce must regularly evaluate applications related to foreign opponents such as China and take action when it determines that they constitute a national security risk.

According to the White House, the order also provides criteria for identifying applications that may pose an “unacceptable risk” to national security.

Since Trump issued two executive orders last year, TikTok’s fate in the United States has been in a state of uncertainty, when the application’s data collection practices were based on national security considerations.

One of the executive orders prohibits TikTok transactions, while the other requires the Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the application’s business in the United States.

These orders would actually ban TikTok, sparking a battle to find buyers for this popular app. Oracle and Wal-Mart reached a complex deal that seemed to be blessed by Trump, but it was not completed before he left office.

According to reports, the transaction was suspended when the Biden administration reviewed the security risks posed by TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps. Neither TikTok nor WeChat immediately responded to requests for comment.

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Pakistan has banned popular Chinese social media video app TikTok, as they are failed to fully comply with the instructions to filter “immoral and indecent” content.

PTA officials said in a statement Friday evening that despite the warnings and long period notices,

TikTok “failed to comply with the instructions, therefore, directions were issued for blocking of TikTok application in the country.”

PTA had received a “number of complaints from different segments of the society” over the videos through citizen portal, it said.

“TikTok has been informed that the authority is open for engagement and will review its decision subject to a satisfactory mechanism by TikTok to moderate unlawful content,”

said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority in a statement.

Pakistan also announced a temporary ban on July 3 on popular multiplayer battle royale game PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), saying it had received complaints the game is “addictive, [a] wastage of time and poses serious negative impact on physical and psychological health of the children.”

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