ByteDance Valuation Hits $550 Billion in Planned Share Sale

Investment company General Atlantic is reportedly selling an equity stake in ByteDance valuing it at $550 billion.

That’s according to a report Wednesday (Feb. 25) from Reuters, citing sources familiar with the planned share sale at the Chinese tech giant.

According to the report, the potential divestment would be the first since the U.S. government cleared the sale of the U.S. business of ByteDance’s TikTok platform in January.

The valuation also represents a 66% jump from the $330 billion ByteDance reached in a share buyback last year, Reuters added.

It’s also up 15% from a secondary market deal (the sale of shares in unlisted companies to another investor from an existing shareholder) that valued ByteDance at $480 billion last year, sources told Reuters.

General Atlantic first invested in ByteDance in 2017 when the company was worth around $20 billion, began the process of selling some of its shares in the past few weeks, and aims to close the sale in March, one of the sources said.

Details about the terms of the sale and how much of ByteDance General Atlantic will own following the transaction were not immediately clear, the report added.

In other ByteDance news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about the launch of the company’s Seedance 2.0 video-generation model, which has sparked fresh excitement in China’s AI sector and drawn comparisons to last year’s DeepSeek moment.

“In a marketplace hungry for innovation beyond text bots, Seedance 2.0 has captured widespread attention for its ability to turn simple prompts into complex, cinematic videos, including multishot scenes with synchronized audio, fueled by a design that processes text, imagery, sound and motion all at once,” the report said.

The arrival of this tool is also connected to a broader shift toward multimodal AI, where the ability to seamlessly blend text, visual and auditory outputs is becoming a key differentiator among the leading artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Although text-centric systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT remain widely popular, video and multimedia generation are a rapidly growing frontier “with implications for creative industries and commercial content workflows,” the report added.

Meanwhile, as covered here, social media platforms are reconfiguring their products in reaction to the surge in AI-generated content.

“Companies including Meta and Pinterest have begun overhauling feeds and labeling systems to more clearly distinguish between human-created and AI-generated posts, reflecting mounting pressure around transparency and trust,” PYMNTS wrote.