TikiTok-parent ByteDance has confirmed that it will be designing its own chips, to be used in its video recommendations systems. Speaking to the Chinese press, the company further confirmed that it would later turn its attention to video codec and cloud inference acceleration, which will likely shake the market up considerably. So why are the big cloud players designing their own silicon? A very simplistic answer is that the compute requirements of the very largest companies have now become so specialized and secretive that they are better served by a bespoke design that cannot be provided by a mass market offering. To use an automotive analogy, you can only push the stock internals of an engine so far, before you…