ByteDance is set to secure a $29.6 billion syndicated loan, marking the second-largest syndicated loan in Asia for the year.

According to Yicai on September 3, ByteDance will secure a USD 29.6 billion syndicated loan. It is learned that ByteDance initially planned to raise USD 20 billion, but the scale was finally expanded to USD 29.6 billion due to strong oversubscription from banks. The funds will be mainly used for general corporate purposes. The transaction has not been formally signed yet, and banks are still confirming the allocated quota. Upon completion, this loan will become the second-largest USD-denominated syndicated loan in Asia this year, second only to the USD 40 billion bridge loan obtained by SoftBank Group in March.

The report also stated that ByteDance is accelerating its AI investment, and is considering raising its 2026 capital expenditure to a maximum of USD 700 billion, which is more than twice that of last year, mainly for expanding data centers and other AI infrastructure. ByteDance's last large-scale overseas loan was in 2024, raising about USD 10.8 billion. As of press time, ByteDance has not yet responded to the matter.

Recently, ByteDance has integrated its AI business. Among them, the Feishu product team has been merged into the Doubao product team, under the unified management of Zhao Qi, the head of Doubao, and Xie Xin, the former head of Feishu, reports to Zhao Qi; the Feishu GTM (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service) team will be integrated with the Volcano Engine team to establish a new To B GTM organization "Creativity Service Platform", which is led by Tan Dai, the head of Volcano Engine, and Lin Chan, Feishu's head of sales, and Shi Zhijun, Feishu's head of strategy and marketing, report to Tan Dai.

At the internal company meeting on August 6, Liang Rubo, CEO of ByteDance, responded to this adjustment. He said that the development of AI in productivity is faster than expected, and To B (enterprise) business has become more important. More than 90% of Feishu's new customers have purchased Feishu AI products at the same time. This integration is a preparation for better building high-quality products for office and productivity scenarios and better serving B-end customers under the huge opportunities brought by AI.

He also summarized the performance of ByteDance's AI business in the first half of 2026: Doubao has maintained its competitiveness in C-end (user) applications, and the video generation model Seedance has maintained SOTA (State of the Art); however, it has also encountered problems such as the widening gap between its large language model and leading overseas models. Liang Rubo said that ByteDance will continue to adhere to independent research and development for large language models, do a solid job in basic skills, accept short-term backwardness, and insist on long-term optimization.

On the same day, a rare statement on AI from Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, was also exposed by the media. According to The Paper, the rapid development of open-source models of domestic competitors this year has brought greater pressure to ByteDance. At a recent internal meeting, Zhang Yiming said that developing models should adhere to long-termism and delayed gratification, rather than using others' outputs to exchange for temporary rankings. It is learned that Zhang Yiming rarely speaks at meetings of the Seed team, but this time he made it clear that ByteDance "should be willing to sacrifice part of short-term gains for long-term goals". ByteDance strictly prohibits distillation of open-source models internally, and even strengthens relevant restrictions through API detection and other methods. Zhang Yiming believes that distillation will interfere with real long-term technological breakthroughs.

At present, global tech giants are increasing their investment in the AI field. On August 24, Alibaba announced on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that the company plans to subscribe for 710 million new shares from professional, institutional and other investors who are non-US persons outside the United States at an allotment price of HK$112.7 per share. The allotment is expected to be completed on August 26. Assuming that all the allotted shares have been allotted to the allottees, the total proceeds from the allotment are expected to be HK$80 billion, and the net proceeds from the allotment are about HK$79.7 billion. 100% of the net proceeds from this allotment will be used to invest in full-stack AI capabilities, strengthen AI infrastructure construction, and further consolidate Alibaba's leading position in the AI field.

In the United States, the total capital expenditure of the four leading cloud vendors Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will reach USD 725 billion in 2026, a sharp increase of 77% from USD 410 billion in 2025; in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the AI infrastructure-related capital expenditure of these four companies reached USD 130 billion. Among them, Microsoft's capital expenditure is expected to reach USD 190 billion, doubling the growth rate over last year; Alphabet raised its guidance to USD 180-190 billion; Meta raised its guidance to USD 125-145 billion.

Goldman Sachs predicts that the proportion of capital expenditure of hyperscale cloud vendors in operating cash flow will rise to about 100% in 2026, which means that these companies are re-investing almost all their internal cash flow into AI infrastructure.

It is worth noting that the largest syndicated loan in Asia within this year is also invested in the AI field. On March 27 local time, SoftBank Group announced that it had obtained a USD 40 billion bridge loan for increasing investment in OpenAI and general corporate purposes. The company previously agreed to invest USD 30 billion in OpenAI through Vision Fund 2. The company said that this bridge loan is an unsecured loan with a maturity of March 2027, arranged by lenders including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and MUFG Bank.

On August 28, according to media reports, SoftBank Group is seeking a USD 10 billion two-year loan to refinance the debt incurred from its investment in U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The loan interest rate is expected to be 275 basis points higher than the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR), with Mizuho Bank acting as the lead arranger and bookrunner.

Part of the proceeds from the loan may be used to repay the USD 40 billion bridge loan that SoftBank obtained earlier this year to invest in OpenAI, which is due on August 31. SoftBank expects to invest nearly USD 65 billion in OpenAI by October.

SoftBank is also considering issuing USD 10 billion to USD 20 billion in bonds recently, and plans to issue retail bonds worth JPY 1 trillion (about USD 6.3 billion) in Japan to raise funds required for OpenAI investment.

This article is from "Jiemian News", author: Chen Xiaotong, published with authorization from 36Kr.