ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent of TikTok, has signed a $29.6 billion loan with a syndicate of 28 banks, making it Asia’s second-largest dollar-denominated borrowing of 2026. The three-year facility, which can be extended to five years, is unsecured and was coordinated by Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.
State-backed lenders carried most of the financing. Fifteen government-backed banks pledged a combined $18.9 billion, or 64% of the total. ICBC committed $3 billion, Bank of China put in $2.5 billion, and China Construction Bank contributed $1.5 billion. HSBC was the top foreign lender at $1.5 billion.
ByteDance had originally sought $20 billion, but the final loan came in nearly $10 billion higher because of unusually strong demand. The pricing underscores lender confidence: the company is borrowing at just 0.68 percentage points above the benchmark rate, compared with SoftBank’s loan at 2.5 percentage points above the benchmark. One source said, “It is very rare to see such a mega loan unsecured. The banks practically are counting purely on ByteDance’s name.”
ByteDance was valued at roughly $550 billion in February and previously raised $10.8 billion from about 20 lenders in 2024. The new loan gives it additional runway to fund the AI buildout without diluting equity.
The company said the proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, but the timing aligns with its AI expansion. ByteDance has budgeted roughly $23.8 billion for AI spending in 2026, with more than half allocated to chips, plus an additional $5 billion for computing infrastructure. The funding will also support AI initiatives outside China, including capacity commitments at data centers across Southeast Asia.
The loan places ByteDance alongside Alibaba and Tencent in a broader race among Chinese technology companies to build AI infrastructure. It also comes as U.S. hyperscalers are forecast to spend more than $800 billion on AI this year and more than $1 trillion in 2027. ByteDance’s net profit fell by more than 70% in 2025, partly because of accounting changes but also reflecting the scale of AI investment.
