ByteDance’s net profit fell by a single-digit percentage to roughly $20 billion in the first half of 2026, even as revenue rose more than 30% year over year to $120 billion. Revenue accelerated as a U.S. regulatory overhang cleared and international advertising, livestreaming and TikTok e-commerce expanded. Net margin narrowed to about 16.7%, extending a decline from 26% in 2023 and 21% in 2024 as ByteDance invested heavily in large language models, video-generation models, AI cloud services and computing infrastructure. TikTok’s overseas business reached a record share of total revenue, while ByteDance secured about $30 billion in bank loans to support its AI expansion and is developing inference chips. Rivals including Alibaba and Zhipu are also raising capital for competing AI infrastructure and models.