TikTok owner ByteDance has secured the second-largest dollar loan deal in Asia this year with a $29.6 billion syndicated loan, and the proceeds have been set aside for the data centers supporting the company’s expensive move into AI. Banks wanted to support way more of this loan than ByteDance initially set out to raise, pushing the company past its $20 billion target to about $30 billion.Citigroup and JPMorgan coordinated the loan deal, which carries a three-year term and an option to run to five. The deal is still not finalized, with banks still confirming their allocations.Triple Bytedance’s loan deal two years agoByteDance pulled in roughly $10.8 billion from about 20 lenders in 2024, in the largest dollar corporate loan in Asia outside Japan at the time. As recently as June, the company was in early talks over a record $20 billion loan facility, with the final numbers surpassing that mark by almost half.The only Asian borrower that has raised more from a loan facility in 2026 is Softbank. The investment company arranged a $40 billion bridge facility in March to back its OpenAI stake.The two deals are different, however, with SoftBank’s being a bridge against an equity position and set to be repaid once longer-term financing comes in, while ByteDance is borrowing against a business that already throws off cash. Banks are effectively treating TikTok and Douyin revenue as the security behind the ByteDance loan.A run at the AI frontierThe stated purpose for this borrowing is general corporate purposes, which for ByteDance right now means compute, and a lot of it. The company is looking at capital spending of as much as $70 billion a year on AI infrastructure, a level that would place it alongside the American hyperscalers.The budget stretches even further than the number suggests, because it costs more than regular. US export controls cap ByteDance’s access to Nvidia’s top chips, so the AI expansion leans on custom silicon using Arm and RISC-V designs, Qualcomm inference parts, and domestic Chinese suppliers.Assembling the same amount of compute that way becomes more expensive in the long run, with part of the spend still flowing to a rival. ByteDance pays more than $1 billion a year to run OpenAI’s models through Microsoft Azure while it funds the homegrown hardware meant to end that reliance.The company is said to be training a ten-trillion-parameter model and enlarging its data center cluster all within Inner Mongolia, which is a scale of development pure operating cash flow alone cannot cover.Numbers only the banks can seeThe $70 billion capex plan sits right against the 160 billion yuan ($22.7 billion) that ByteDance had earlier claimed to budget for 2026, and accounts differ on whether the larger number is a firm decision or a scenario still under review.The company has not addressed these figures publicly, as it stays privately held, files no financial statements, and reveals its capital spending mainly through the banks that handle its funds.Big Tech’s AI-related debt has now passed $350 billion as firms fund data centers with borrowed money instead of their own earnings, and a deal this size moves a large chunk of that borrowing outside the U.S.If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.