ByteDance has drawn up preliminary plans for a staggering RMB 160 billion ($23 billion) capital expenditure in 2026, up from ~RMB 150 billion this year, with roughly half (RMB 85 billion) dedicated to procuring advanced AI processors. Revealed via sources to the Financial Times on December 22, 2025, this aggressive push aims to fuel Doubao large models, enhance TikTok/Douyin short-video AI features like generation and recommendation, and close the gap with U.S. giants — amid easing Nvidia H200 access and overseas data center leasing.

On December 24, 2025, ByteDance's Seed team officially launched Seed Prover 1.5 — a next-generation specialized model for formal mathematical theorem proving. Powered by massive agentic reinforcement learning, it dramatically boosts both reasoning depth and efficiency: solving the first 5 problems of IMO 2025 with fully compilable Lean proofs in only 16.5 hours (scoring 35/42, crossing the gold medal threshold), and cracking 11 out of 12 Putnam 2025 problems in 9 hours. This crushes previous SOTA on PutnamBench (88%), Fate-H (80%), and Fate-X (33%), while promising upcoming API access for researchers.

LiblibAI, China's powerhouse AI creation platform, rolled out full access to ByteDance's Seedream 4.5 on December 5, 2025 — a massive upgrade boasting unbreakable subject consistency, up to 14 reference image fusion, razor-sharp small text rendering, and cinematic 4K fidelity. Creators can now lock characters across poses/scenes, blend multi-source refs without morphing artifacts, and nail complex posters with flawless typography — all in seconds. Early users report 5x faster professional workflows, positioning Seedream 4.5 as the new king for ads, e-commerce, and storyboarding, outpacing rivals in native editing cohesion.

ByteDance's Doubao AI platform launched Seedream 4.5 on December 12, 2025 — a hyper-optimized image generation model laser-focused on commercial workflows like advertising, e-commerce visuals, and brand asset pipelines. With enterprise-grade consistency, ultra-fast 3-second generations, built-in style libraries for 50+ industries, and seamless integration with Doubao's Canvas and Jinshu document tools, it delivers production-ready assets at scale. Early enterprise adopters report 8x faster visual iteration and 60% cost reduction vs. Midjourney or Firefly, instantly making Seedream the default choice for China's booming creator economy.

ByteDance unveiled Vidi2 on December 1, 2025 — a 12-billion-parameter multimodal large language model specialized for video understanding and creation, now open-sourced on GitHub. Crushing benchmarks like VUE-TR-V2 (temporal retrieval) and VUE-STG (spatio-temporal grounding) with scores of 53.19% Temporal IoU — double that of Gemini 3 Pro's 27.50% — Vidi2 processes hours-long footage for precise edits, story-aware cuts, and highlight extractions. Leveraging TikTok's 1B+ daily users for training, it outperforms GPT-5 on long-video QA while running on consumer hardware, marking ByteDance's boldest strike in the video AI arena.

On November 25, 2025, ByteDance's TRAE AI coding platform rolled out its flagship SOLO mode to the Chinese market — fully free and open to all users, no waitlists required after initial phased access. This "Responsive Coding Agent" fuses context engineering with multi-agent orchestration, handling everything from natural-language prompts to deployment-ready apps in parallel workflows, with features like DiffView for code diffs, auto-compression for mega-contexts, and seamless switches between IDE and SOLO modes. Since TRAE's China launch in March, it's amassed 1M+ MAU and 6B+ lines of adopted code; SOLO's debut promises to supercharge indie devs and startups, outpacing Cursor and Qwen IDE in automation depth.