Although ByteDance cannot get its hands on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPUs to develop its AI products, the company is looking forward to using a cluster containing 36,000 of its B200 GPUs that is physically located in Malaysia, reports the Wall Street Journal. The cluster will be used for research and development purposes as the company wants its share of the global AI pie. Nvidia says it is perfectly legal for the company to use such a cluster as long as it was built in compliance with the U.S. export controls.
The cluster, worth around $2.5 billion and consisting of 500 NVL72 GB200 rack-scale systems, will be formally owned and operated by Aolani Cloud in Malaysia. The hardware will be supplied through Aivres, a company that builds servers based on Nvidia GPUs, according to the WSJ, which cites people familiar with the arrangements. An Aolani spokesperson told WSJ that the company currently operates with roughly $100 million worth of hardware, so the scale of the proposed expansion is vast, but it is not completely clear who is funding it. ByteDance is also reportedly considering additional deployments, such as a cluster containing over 7,000 B200 GPUs at a data center in Indonesia.
