According to IT Home on August 1st, based on a report by The Information on the 31st local time, as of March this year, TikTok pays Microsoft nearly US$20 million (IT Home note: currently approximately 145 million yuan) per month to purchase OpenAI's models through Microsoft. This amount accounts for almost a quarter of Microsoft's AI revenue, making TikTok one of Microsoft's largest AI service customers.

In the global cloud computing market competition, Microsoft has successfully transformed its cloud services into a lucrative business by integrating OpenAI's artificial intelligence technology. Microsoft's cloud AI business is expected to achieve annual revenue of US$1 billion (currently approximately 7.248 billion yuan), but the report notes that if TikTok develops its own large language model, it may no longer need to rely so heavily on these capabilities (from Microsoft).

The report states that ByteDance is attempting to build its own AI models. Foreign media outlet The Verge claimed in December last year that ByteDance even used OpenAI's technology to achieve these goals.

This current "dilemma" is actually not new in the rapidly developing AI field, and NVIDIA is also facing a similar situation to Microsoft. As an AI chip manufacturer, NVIDIA's business is highly concentrated in giant technology companies. However, these customers, including Microsoft, have used NVIDIA's hardware to build their own AI chips, raising concerns among investors and analysts that some NVIDIA customers will eventually "no longer need" its products.