ByteDance Pulls Ahead in China’s AI Cloud Race
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ByteDance Ltd.’s cloud unit has rolled out a new version of its large language model (LLM), Doubao, after cementing its lead in China’s artificial intelligence race with nearly half of the public cloud LLM services market.
On Thursday, Volcengine released the upgraded Doubao 1.6 model with a new “thinking length” feature designed to address the trade-off between performance, latency, and cost for enterprise clients. The company also released a lightweight Doubao model and two new voice models.
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- Volcengine released Doubao 1.6, introducing adjustable "thinking lengths" and two new voice models with 90% academic reading accuracy.
- In H1 2025, Volcengine led China's public cloud LLM market with a 49.2% share; Doubao's daily token calls surpassed 30 trillion, up 235 times from May 2024.
- Doubao models now run on over 460 million smart devices, covering multiple speech and text AI functions.
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Who’s Who
- ByteDance Ltd.
- ByteDance Ltd.'s cloud unit, Volcengine, leads China's public cloud LLM services market with a 49.2% share. They've rolled out an upgraded version of their large language model, Doubao 1.6, and new voice models. Doubao's daily token calls surged to over 30 trillion as of late September, demonstrating significant growth. The company emphasizes performance, cost, and stability for enterprise clients with its closed-source Doubao model.
- Volcengine
- Volcengine is ByteDance Ltd.'s cloud unit and a leader in China's AI race. It holds 49.2% of the public cloud LLM services market. Volcengine recently released an upgraded version of its large language model, Doubao 1.6, featuring a "thinking length" for optimized performance, latency, and cost. The company also introduced new lightweight and voice models, with voice models currently on over 460 million smart devices.
- Alibaba Cloud
- Alibaba Cloud holds a significant position in China's public cloud LLM services market. In the first half of 2025, according to an IDC report, Alibaba Cloud had a 27% share of this market, placing it second behind Volcengine. This indicates its strong presence and competition within the rapidly growing AI landscape in China.
- Baidu AI Cloud
- Baidu AI Cloud held a 6.8% share of China's public cloud LLM service market in the first half of 2025. This places them third behind Volcengine and Alibaba Cloud.
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What Happened When
- May 2024：
- Volcengine launched its Doubao large language model (LLM).
- May 2024：
- The Doubao family of voice models debuted.
- End of May 2025：
- Doubao LLM daily token calls baseline used for growth comparison (over 80% increase by late September 2025).
- First half of 2025：
- Volcengine held a 49.2% share of China’s public cloud LLM service market.
- June 2025：
- Doubao 1.6 was first introduced.
- Late September 2025：
- Doubao LLM daily token calls surged to over 30 trillion.
- 2025-10-15：
- Volcengine announced daily token calls for Doubao LLM have surged to over 30 trillion as of late September 2025.
- 2025-10-16：
- Volcengine released the upgraded Doubao 1.6 model, a lightweight Doubao model, and two new voice models (Doubao-Seed-TTS 2.0 and Doubao-Seed-ICL 2.0).
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