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6.1 billion spent in quick succession on two sites in Beijing, with Zhang Yiming's 550-billion-yuan ByteDance entering a spending spree

In less than two months, ByteDance spent a staggering 6.1 billion yuan to acquire two plots of land in Beijing.

At the beginning of February, ByteDance invested 2.8 billion yuan to secure the Lanjing Lijia plot in Haidian District, Beijing. By the end of March, ByteDance made another move, spending 3.305 billion yuan to acquire the Shuangquanbao plot in Xueyuan Road, Haidian District.

It is reported that the former is planned for comprehensive commercial and financial service use, while the latter will be designated for office and research and development purposes.

According to Interface News, based on ByteDance's current investment priorities, after the completion of the latter, it may primarily serve functions such as large model development, artificial intelligence, and foundational technology R&D.

Radar Finance learned that since 2020, aside from Beijing, ByteDance has also acquired multiple plots of land in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou.

According to incomplete media statistics, over six years, ByteDance has spent more than 30 billion yuan on acquiring buildings and land, with a total construction area of approximately 1.57 million square meters.

Some analysis points out that the reduction in leasing by traditional finance and service sectors has led to increased vacancy rates in certain business districts, but companies like ByteDance, which represent 'new quality productivity' in artificial intelligence and the digital economy, are becoming growth drivers for office space demand.

Aside from aggressively acquiring land in the real estate sector, ByteDance has also made substantial investments in AI, sparing no expense. In 2026 alone, ByteDance plans to invest 160 billion yuan in the development of its AI business.

Driven by its full commitment to artificial intelligence, ByteDance's valuation has been elevated to 480 billion US dollars. Foreign media even predict that the company’s net profit in 2025 could reach approximately 50 billion US dollars.

In the 'Hurun Global Rich List 2026' released this March, Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, also shone brightly thanks to the company's outstanding performance, reclaiming the title of China's richest person with a fortune of 550 billion yuan.

ByteDance splurges $3.3 billion to acquire a plot in Beijing

According to information from the Beijing Public Resources Trading Service Platform, the latest plot acquired by ByteDance is located in the Shuangquanpu area of the Xueyuan Road Subdistrict in Haidian District, covering an area of 4.89 hectares.

It is reported that the government land revenue transaction price for this plot was 366 million yuan, with the total transaction price reaching 3.305 billion yuan. The transferee is Beijing Yunxiu Changshi Technology Co., Ltd.

Tianyancha shows that Beijing Yunxiu Changshi Technology Co., Ltd., established in October 2025, has a registered capital of 1.95 billion yuan and is a wholly foreign-owned enterprise controlled by ByteDance, specializing in innovation at the intersection of information technology and real estate services.

The data indicates that the plot acquired by ByteDance is the 0807-604 lot of Phase III of Dongsheng Science Park in Xueyuan Road, Haidian District. It is designated for office and research purposes, with a planned construction area of 128,000 square meters, a plot ratio of 2.62, and a concession period of 50 years. The contract stipulates a start date of March 31, 2027, and a completion date of March 30, 2030.

Geographically, the plot has significant advantages, bordering Tsinghua East Road to the north and close to Beishatan Station on Metro Line 15. Within a 3-kilometer radius are 39 universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with over 100 scientific research institutes, making its location highly suitable for AI and cutting-edge technology development.

It is reported that as early as April last year, the Haidian Branch of the Beijing Municipal Planning and Natural Resources Commission publicly auctioned the 0807-604 lot of Phase III of Haidian Dongsheng Science Park and set application requirements.

According to the disclosed announcement at that time, the industrial positioning of the company acquiring the land must be within key industries of the digital economy such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, Internet 3.0, smart connected vehicles, basic software, 5G/6G, and intelligent manufacturing, as well as future industries like the metaverse, brain-computer interfaces, quantum information, humanoid robots, next-generation display, and new energy storage.

Moreover, the company needs to meet the criteria for the ten high-end precision industries listed in relevant documents, continuously operate in Haidian, and achieve annual revenue of no less than 600 million yuan per 10,000 square meters per year, contributing no less than 12 million yuan per 10,000 square meters per year to the district-level finance starting from the application year. Alternatively, it can be a park development enterprise authorized by the Beijing municipal or Haidian district governments according to relevant document requirements.

Less than half a year after the announcement, Beijing Yunxiu Changshi Technology Co., Ltd. was registered and established, and acquired the land parcel in March this year.

According to Viewpoint, there were previous reports that ByteDance would establish a presence in Phase II of Zhongguancun Dongsheng Science Park, expected to lease an entire building to accommodate teams from Douyin’s content operations, experience, and services.

Subsequently, the official website of Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development disclosed renovation permit information for Floors B1 and 2 through 9 of Building 1, Yard 8, North Street, Dongsheng Science Park, Haidian District. The construction entity is ByteDance, which has leased the entire Building 1 of Yard 8, including the underground B1 level, two floors above ground, and nine additional floors, with a total construction area of 15,000 square meters. The total investment is 28.4168 million yuan, with a completion date set for January 28, 2026.

It is expected that within 2026, ByteDance will fully vacate its office space in Perfect World Tower located in the Yaaotown section on North Yuanyuan Road, relocating the aforementioned employees to Dongsheng Science Park.

ByteDance's 'aggressive land acquisition,' splurging over 30 billion yuan in six years.

A review by Radar Finance found that the land parcel in Shuangquanpu Area, Xueyuanlu Subdistrict, Haidian District, is actually the second plot ByteDance has acquired within nearly two months.

In early February this year, Beijing held its first major land auction of 2026. In this highly anticipated land bidding event, Beijing Yunyue Changshi Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of ByteDance, acquired plots HD00-1603-01 and HD00-1603-03A of the Lanjing Lijia Land Reserve Project in Haidian District at the base price of 2.8 billion yuan.

The data shows that the construction land area of this plot is 39,500 square meters, with a maximum above-ground building scale of 96,800 square meters. The transaction floor price is approximately 28,900 yuan per square meter, designated as mixed-use commercial and financial service land.

This land parcel is located at the northeast corner of Lianxiang Bridge on Beijing's North Third Ring Road. Its predecessor was the Lanjing Lijia Dazhong Temple Home Furnishing Plaza, which had been in operation for over 28 years. This area is now part of the先导区 (Pilot Zone) of Beijing’s 'Artificial Intelligence Innovation Street Dazhong Temple Area' and is close to Douyin Fangheng Plaza, facing ByteDance's Dazhong Temple headquarters.

Currently, this project has been listed as one of Beijing’s key projects for 2026, with plans to develop a digital economy industrial park integrating high-end offices and business facilities. It will include 4,200 workstations and 288 hotel rooms, all self-owned for 20 years, forming synergy with nearby self-owned properties already in use.

In addition to the two land transactions totaling approximately 6.1 billion yuan mentioned above, ByteDance has actually been aggressively acquiring self-owned plots across the country on a large scale.

In Beijing alone, ByteDance acquired Dazhong Temple Zhongkun Plaza for 9 billion yuan in 2019, with subsequent construction reaching about 400,000 square meters.

In 2020, ByteDance spent approximately 5 billion yuan to acquire the Fangheng Fashion Center, which covers an area of about 23,000 square meters, further expanding its asset portfolio in the capital.

Including the two recently acquired plots, ByteDance’s total self-owned and under-construction property floor space in Beijing has exceeded 740,000 square meters, covering key areas such as Haidian Zhongguancun, Xueyuan Road, and Dazhong Temple on the North Third Ring Road.

These plots are not merely simple land reserves but serve an important mission in supporting ByteDance's core business development. They will primarily be used for offices related to core operations like Douyin, TikTok, Feishu, and large model R&D, while also featuring commercial spaces and hotels as配套设施.

Beyond actively acquiring land in its Beijing headquarters, since 2020, ByteDance's expansion efforts have extended to first-tier cities and major economic regions like Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou.

According to incomplete statistics from Interface News, over the past six years, ByteDance has invested more than 30 billion yuan in purchasing buildings and land, with a total floor area reaching about 1.57 million square meters.

Among these, the first self-owned and self-built regional headquarters of the Douyin Group — the Douyin Group Houhai Center — officially opened in July last year. It mainly handles core functions such as Greater Bay Area business management and technology R&D.

In January this year, ByteDance made another significant investment by starting construction on Douyin's second headquarters in Shenzhen. This will support the R&D of core products like Douyin and Toutiao, while also accommodating new business expansions such as payment services. Additionally, it will house ByteDance's AI Lab research center and SaaS platform service center.

With the explosive growth in employee numbers, is ByteDance finally bidding farewell to its 'nomadic' lifestyle?

The move to purchase land domestically with large sums of money reflects the contradiction between ByteDance's growing labor demands and its shortage of office space.

Rewinding to 2012, ByteDance’s entrepreneurial journey quietly began in a modest residential apartment. At that time, Zhang Yiming rented a residential unit on Zhichun Road in Beijing, marking the start of ByteDance's entrepreneurial chapter.

By the following New Year's Day, ByteDance reached an important milestone in its development as its product surpassed 1.6 million daily active users (DAU). Not long after the Lunar New Year, the ByteDance team quickly expanded to 30 or 40 people.

As the company's business grew rapidly, the residential space originally used for entrepreneurship increasingly felt cramped. In March 2013, Zhang Yiming's team began searching for a new location for ByteDance.

Two months later, ByteDance moved to the tenth floor of Yingdu Building, just one kilometer away. However, the company’s growth far exceeded expectations, and within the next two years, ByteDance leased multiple additional floors in Yingdu Building, including the eighth, eleventh, and third floors.

At that time, in a 900-square-meter space on one floor of Yingdu Building, ByteDance squeezed in more than 200 employees. In comparison, foreign internet companies of a similar scale typically occupy office areas exceeding 3,000 square meters.

As the company continued to grow, ByteDance had no choice but to embark on a journey to find office buildings across Beijing. In 2016, ByteDance moved into Aviation Plaza. But less than two weeks after moving in, this vast new building, where it was easy to get lost, once again faced a space shortage.

Afterward, centered around Zhichun Road, ByteDance entered a phase of frequent relocations, moving from one building to another. This pattern only slowed down when the company initiated its plan to purchase real estate.

According to Tianyancha, ByteDance’s Beijing-based subsidiary Zijie Tiao Network Technology Co., Ltd., had only 162 employees registered for social insurance in 2018, but by 2022, four years later, the number of insured employees skyrocketed to over 16,000.

In March 2020, ByteDance publicly announced that its global workforce would increase to 100,000. With Beijing being a key area for ByteDance's operations, the total number of employees in the city has already exceeded 50,000.

Notably, after the successive launches of hit products like Toutiao and Douyin, AI has undoubtedly become the core growth engine for ByteDance's next phase. The thriving development of its AI business also heavily relies on the robust support of its own real estate infrastructure.

In fact, in the fierce AI competition with major tech giants, ByteDance has demonstrated an impressive willingness to invest without hesitation.

According to public reports, ByteDance’s investment in AI is enormous, with capital expenditure reaching 80 billion yuan in 2024, close to the combined total of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (approximately 100 billion yuan).

By 2025, ByteDance’s capital expenditure is expected to reach 160 billion yuan, aimed at building a self-controlled large-scale data center cluster. Of this, around 90 billion yuan will be allocated for purchasing AI computing power, while 70 billion yuan will go toward IDC infrastructure and network equipment.

There are reports that in 2026, ByteDance plans to invest another 160 billion yuan to further develop its AI operations.

After such aggressive spending sprees, can ByteDance secure significant returns in the future? Radar Finance will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Produced by Leidacaijing, Written by Ding Yu, Edited by Meng Shuai

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