ByteDance AI, Sprinting Amid Anxiety

On one hand, there is the rapid growth of MaaS at a 10-fold speed. On the other hand, there are ever-increasing computing power bills. ByteDance's AI business is facing a sweet dilemma.

From June 23rd to 24th, the "2026 Volcengine FORCE Conference" was held in Beijing. The venue was packed, and the event was extremely popular. At the conference, Liang Rubo, the CEO of ByteDance, delivered a video speech. He said that the company's keyword for this year has become "Climbing the Peak", and "Climbing the AI Peak" is the most important thing at present.

"In the past few years, we have been narrowing the scope of our business and focusing our energy on AI. In the AI field, we focus on improving model capabilities. The Volc MaaS business is becoming the basic business of ByteDance, and our investment will be long - term and firm."

Tan Dai, the president of Volcengine, disclosed the specific data of Volc MaaS. As of June this year, the daily average Token call volume of the Doubao large - model has exceeded 180 trillion, with a growth of more than 10 times in the past year.

In terms of MaaS market share, Volcengine is far ahead, with a Token share of 49.5% - for every two Tokens consumed by Chinese enterprises, one is provided by Volcengine. The number of companies in Volcengine's "Trillion - Token Club" has increased from 100 in December 2025 to 200.

On the model side, ByteDance has released two important upgrades: one is the Doubao large - model 2.1 Pro, which focuses on improving coding and office capabilities. The other is that Seedance 2.5 will be released in early July. The maximum length of single - segment video generation is 30 seconds, and it can support the joint input of up to 50 full - modality materials, as well as more flexible and controllable video editing capabilities.

However, the growth of the model and the surge in the number of users are also posing severe challenges to ByteDance's computing power and model commercialization.

01

ByteDance Struggles to "Nurture" Doubao

According to a report by "LatePost", Doubao, which had a DAU of 200 million in the first half of the year, has a daily income of less than one million yuan, while the daily application consumption can reach tens of millions of yuan. In terms of the construction of computing power centers, ByteDance plans to increase its capital expenditure in 2026 to over 200 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 60% of its profit in 2025.

According to a report by 36Kr, Volcengine has raised its MaaS revenue target for this year to 15 billion yuan, which is 10 times that of 2025. However, this wave of MaaS revenue growth of Volcengine is mainly due to the explosion of Seedance 2.0, which can contribute more than one billion yuan in monthly revenue. According to "China Entrepreneur", in the first half of the year, the agency fee for Seedance 2.0 has risen to over 10 million yuan, and it is still in short supply.

It is indeed gratifying that Seedance has quickly become Volcengine's "cash cow", but it is hard to say that this is a revenue structure that can be reassuring.

When being interviewed by media such as "China Entrepreneur", Tan Dai said: "The revenue data of Seedance spread outside are all wrong and on the high side. I'm under a lot of pressure, and the finance department asks me every day if I'm hiding the numbers." He also revealed that the daily average Token call volume of 180 trillion includes both internal and external use, as well as the use within the Doubao App itself.

Photography: Yan Junwen

As for the computing power pressure, Tan Dai said directly that it is not the current focus of Volcengine. "We haven't evaluated the computing power bill from the perspective of Volcengine. We mainly focus on the to - B business."

However, it is obvious that ByteDance is finding it increasingly difficult to "support" Doubao.

An AI Infra founder analyzed the profit - sharing pattern of the Token industry chain to "China Entrepreneur": Upstream hardware manufacturers such as GPU take away at least 60% of the revenue; mid - stream cloud and AI Infra manufacturers add a gross profit of over 50% when selling Tokens, and the downstream intelligent agents and application development links hardly make any profit. "If Doubao continues to maintain such user growth, the computing power consumption may exhaust ByteDance."

Under pressure, on June 24th, despite the complaints from many users, Doubao still launched the Doubao Pro version. The standard package costs 68 yuan per month for continuous subscription, the enhanced package costs 200 yuan per month for continuous subscription, and the advanced package costs 500 yuan per month for continuous subscription.

Volcengine is also secretly tightening the preferential quotas for customers. An AI plush toy manufacturer that cooperates with Volcengine told "China Entrepreneur" that in 2025, Volcengine did not charge API fees for the large - model. But this year, Volcengine has started to charge them 6 yuan per year for each toy's call, and they have pre - deposited 10 million yuan in their Volcengine account for this purpose.

Xing Xiaoci, the person in charge of the large - model intelligent hardware at Volcengine, disclosed that as of June this year, the number of AIoT hardware devices connected to Doubao, excluding mobile phones and cars, has exceeded 10 million.

02

Seedance Eats into the Market Share of Bilibili, iQiyi, etc.

In just a few months, the rapid rise of Seedance has caused anxiety and panic among video companies.

"China Entrepreneur" learned that recently, the founder of a leading AI video startup company urgently held a high - level meeting to soothe the team's emotions. He said not to be intimidated by ByteDance's offensive, as no one has an absolute lead in model progress, and everyone is catching up with each other. For this reason, the company also urgently carried out a large - scale round of financing to soothe the team and customers.

However, relying on Seedance, ByteDance is still mercilessly entering the territory of iQiyi and Bilibili. The upcoming Seedance 2.5 series of models will support the generation of longer videos and production - level content creation, and may even pose a challenge to cinema companies.

Zhang Tianjie, the person in charge of the large - model solutions at Volcengine, said that due to the good consistency performance of Seedance, it has solved the problems of low efficiency and high cost in short - video splicing. "Once users have used Seedance, it's hard for them to 'go back' to the previous era."

He also mentioned the "secondary creation of film and television" market - which is also Bilibili's stronghold. Zhang Tianjie believes that the combination of secondary creation and IP will open up a broad market, and the market scale may be larger than the current model Token approach.

On June 23rd, Volcengine launched the Volc AI Copyright Commercialization Platform. They cooperated with director Stephen Chow, and users can conduct secondary creation of three classic movie IPs, "Kung Fu Hustle", "The God of Cookery", and "All's Well That Ends Well", on Douyin, Jimeng, and Jianying based on the officially authorized templates.

In addition, Volcengine is also working on solving the copyright issues in the development of top IPs and star AIs. In April, iQiyi announced that more than a hundred stars had joined the AI artist library, but it caused a backlash from many artists, who refused to authorize.

An employee of Volcengine told "China Entrepreneur" that Seedance will open up cooperation by taking a commission. The cooperation is divided into two types: public authorization and project authorization. Public authorization means that users can use a star's face as long as they pay.

Seedance 2.5 will also launch the "3D white - model preview" function. In science - fiction films and large - scale scene production, 3D white - model preview can help the team determine the space, camera positions, movements, and skill movements in advance, and help creators control the video generation process more precisely.

"China Entrepreneur" observed that Volcengine is integrating the capabilities of products such as Douyin, Qishui Music, and Hongguo Short Dramas into its product line. For example, the script - writing Agent in the IP asset library is participated by the Douyin platform team, and the AI content creation link is participated by Qishui Music.

Currently, all the top 20 companies in the AI short - drama market have accessed Volcengine's AI solutions, covering business processes such as IP asset library, AI content creation, rendering content creation, post - production editing, and advertising platform placement.

Seedance 2.5 will also be used in industrial scenarios, such as helping to synthesize embodied intelligent training data, reducing collection costs, and accelerating model iteration; synthesizing scenario data for extreme weather and rare road conditions in autonomous driving to supplement training blind spots. "When the video generation model crosses the production - level qualitative change point, its understanding of the physical world is becoming an important foundation for the world model." Tan Dai said.

03

The Coding and Office Markets are Full of Competitors

While raising the charging capacity of Seedance, ByteDance is also accelerating the commercialization of Doubao. Recently, Doubao has successively launched functions such as "Ask Doubao Before Buying", group - buying, and taxi - hailing, but the effects seem to be less than satisfactory.

On June 24th, based on the Doubao 2.1 series of large - models, Doubao officially announced the launch of the professional version. The professional version is designed for complex office and productivity scenarios, supporting operations on local computers, using browsers, invoking Skills, and setting up scheduled tasks; it also has a built - in Office suite, supporting professional image and video design, as well as application and website generation.

Source: Volcengine official

However, some users complained in the community: Although the function quota of the Doubao Pro version is more than 5 times that of the free version in the expert mode and office task mode, "generating a 30 - second video may use up 40% of the quota."

In the AI office market, products such as Alibaba's Qoder and Tencent's WorkBuddy have occupied the market in advance. Among them, Qoder Work was launched in internal testing in January, and WorkBuddy was launched in internal testing in February. According to media reports, the total number of users of Alibaba's Qoder series has exceeded 5 million, and the ARR has exceeded 60 million US dollars.

In contrast, ByteDance's TRAE, although Hong Dingkun, the vice - president of ByteDance's technology, disclosed that the daily average Token consumption of TRAE has reached 560 billion, a 50 - fold increase compared to last year; but compared with its competitors, TRAE is still a step behind.

By June this year, TRAE SOLO was upgraded to TRAE Work. Currently, TRAE Work includes two core modes: Work and Code. The Work mode is for daily work scenarios such as content creation, data analysis, plan writing, and communication and collaboration, while the Code mode is for programming scenarios.

However, Tan Dai told media such as "China Entrepreneur" that the outside world pays more attention to Seedance because it is the first global SOTA - but Volcengine still believes that Coding is very important internally. Currently, in the field of AI Coding products, Volcengine has the low - code platform Coze, as well as the high - code platforms HiAgent and Trae, which improve efficiency for ordinary users, enterprises, and professional developers respectively.

It is worth noting that on June 23rd, Alibaba's Coding product Qoder announced that all products in the Qoder family have launched a "night - time discount" activity. The model capabilities remain the same, only the pricing has changed - on the same day, Alibaba's video generation model HappyHorse 1.1 was also officially released.

However, Tan Dai and Volcengine don't seem to be anxious about the computing power bill. He mentioned more about the Token value, model capabilities, production - level industrial scenarios, and understanding customer scenarios.

"Currently, AI is still in its early stage. We ran 500 meters last year and more than 1 kilometer this year. But this 1 - kilometer has crossed the qualitative change point of production, and the model can create value in the production process, which is very important."

This article is from the WeChat official account "China Entrepreneur Magazine" (ID: iceo - com - cn), written by Yan Junwen and edited by He Yifan. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.