ByteDance Volcengine — Inner Mongolia AI Training Cluster

ByteDance’s Inner Mongolia data center cluster, operated through its cloud arm Volcengine, is one of the largest AI training facilities in China. Inner Mongolia is a preferred location for Chinese hyperscalers due to ultra-cheap coal and wind power, cool climate for natural cooling, and lenient environmental standards. The facility trains ByteDance’s Doubao (豆包) large language models and the underlying AI infrastructure for TikTok and Douyin recommendation algorithms, which involve some of the world’s largest-scale reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) deployments. ByteDance reportedly deployed over 100,000 NVIDIA H800 GPUs (the export-restricted variant sold to China) in 2023 before the clampdown on such shipments. The cluster also supports cloud services offered to Chinese enterprises through Volcengine.