ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming has ascended to become China’s wealthiest individual, fueled by growing investor confidence in the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
According to Forbes estimates, Zhang’s net worth has surged to $65.5 billion, surpassing beverage giant Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan, who holds $56.5 billion. Zhang, 41, maintains a 21% stake in the privately held tech giant, although he stepped down as chairman in 2021 after relinquishing his role as chief executive earlier that year.
ByteDance’s valuation fluctuates between $240 billion and upwards of $400 billion in secondary markets. Major investors like Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group reportedly value the TikTok parent company at the higher end of that spectrum. Forbes pegs the company’s value at $312 billion, based on a recent share buyback program and insights from analysts, as well as a ByteDance investor who preferred to remain anonymous. This represents a more than 40% increase since 2024, when some private market investors were willing to acquire ByteDance shares at a valuation of $217 billion.
The company has benefited from a seemingly improving situation for TikTok in the United States. President Donald Trump indicated he would “probably” extend the April 5 deadline for the popular short video platform to be sold or banned, according to Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of Rainmaker Securities. Trump stated he was negotiating with potential U.S. buyers for a stake in TikTok, potentially leading to a deal in the near future.
Simultaneously, investors have become increasingly optimistic about China’s prominent technology firms, including ByteDance. They are encouraged by renewed government support for private-sector businesses and the country’s advancements in AI, despite efforts from the U.S. to curb these developments through export controls. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the performance of companies like Alibaba and Tencent, has seen an 80% surge over the past 12 months. “All China tech assets staged a big rebound off the low base,” stated Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst at 86Research, via WeChat.
ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot has emerged as the world’s second most popular AI chatbot, based on monthly active users (MAUs). Powered by its own large language model (LLM), the free product had 82 million MAUs in February. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which held the top spot, reached 400 million MAUs during the same period, according to aicpb.com, a website that tracks AI products. DeepSeek, whose AI chatbot model surprised Silicon Valley earlier in the year, ranked fourth with 62 million MAUs. A ByteDance spokesperson declined to comment on this data.
While no longer involved in ByteDance’s day-to-day operations, Zhang continues to play a key role in the company’s AI strategy, according to media reports. The reclusive billionaire has fostered an intense focus on AI, with the ultimate goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that rivals or surpasses human intelligence, according to state-affiliated news outlet The Paper. The report also mentioned that Zhang is spearheading ByteDance’s recruitment of AI-related talent. Zhang is reportedly paying an annual salary of over 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) to poach a top AI engineer from a competitor, according to local media.
ByteDance has also earmarked significant investments in AI-related infrastructure. The company has allocated 40 billion yuan ($5.5 billion) for the procurement of AI chips within China in 2025, as well as $6.8 billion for investments in overseas AI-related infrastructure, according to a Financial Times report that cited anonymous sources. In the previous year, the company spent $8 billion on AI-related servers, which support the computing demands of artificial intelligence, according to a March research report by Beijing-based brokerage Cinda Securities.
However, 86Research’s Chai warned that competition in AI is escalating in China. While ByteDance operates popular social media platforms, including TikTok’s sister app Douyin, which helps promote its Doubao chatbot, Chai suggests that Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is currently “leading the competition” in terms of AI models that fuel these services.
Last week, Alibaba revealed its latest AI model, the QwQ-32B, which exhibited enhanced performance and reasoning capabilities, requiring less data for training, according to the company. Another model from the Chinese e-commerce giant, Qwen2.5-Max, is the world’s ninth most popular AI model, based on user votes, according to Chatbot Arena, a ranking platform developed by researchers including from the University of California, Berkeley. Privately held DeepSeek’s R1 model ranks sixth. ByteDance’s products are not currently among the top ten.
“While chatbots provide a convenient consumer-facing interface showcasing the power of AI to the public, what truly matters is the back-end models, which should be evaluated more rigorously in terms of performance and costs,” Chai stated via WeChat. Alibaba’s model is the research firm’s top pick based on these criteria, he added.
