On July 19, Beijing time, a spokesman for ByteDance confirmed today that the company is considering designing its own chip. The move marks that ByteDance will join a series of Chinese Internet giants developing semiconductors. According to previous reports, ByteDance is recruiting a large number of chip related engineers, such as SOC front-end design, model performance analysis and verification, underlying software and driver development, low-power design and chip security. People familiar with the matter said that this indicates that ByteDance may be preparing for self-developed chips. A spokesman for ByteDance said that the company was exploring chip designs that could be used in its professional field because the company could not find a supplier that could meet its requirements. These chips will be customized to handle the workload related to ByteDance in multiple business areas, including video platforms, information and entertainment applications. ByteDance will not sell its chips to other companies. ByteDance's move into the field of semiconductor design shows that Chinese enterprises are increasingly concerned about manufacturing chips for special purposes. In the past few years, many companies, including search giant Baidu and e-commerce giant Alibaba, have released their own designed chips, although these companies have no traditional semiconductor background. For these companies, customized chips belong to a special component they create according to their own business needs, and there is no need to buy ready-made chips from another company. However, they still need contract manufacturers such as TSMC to help them produce chips, which is somewhat similar to Apple's self-developed chips. Semiconductors are key components and are used in products ranging from smart machines to automobiles. For many years, China has been vigorously investing in promoting the development of the domestic chip industry. (Xinhua News Agency)