- ByteDance's Volcano Engine has surpassed 100 trillion daily AI token calls, becoming the third company globally to reach this scale.
- Driven by surging demand in the AI cloud services market, Volcano Engine has raised its 2026 revenue target of 10 billion yuan ($1.45 billion).
Daily cloud-based large model token calls at Volcano Engine, ByteDance's cloud computing arm, have surpassed 100 trillion. The figure surged by over 60% in less than two months, highlighting the increasingly fierce competition in the global AI cloud services market.
Local media outlet LatePost reported the figure on Wednesday, noting that only three tech giants globally — OpenAI, Google, and ByteDance — have crossed the 100 trillion daily token consumption threshold.
ByteDance's current token consumption is primarily driven by the domestic Chinese market, while its overseas business is in a rapid growth phase, LatePost said.
The surge in token usage aligns with the explosive growth trend of overall AI computing power usage in China.
China's daily AI token calls topped 140 trillion in March, surging more than 1,000 times compared to early 2024, the National Data Administration disclosed yesterday.
Tokens, the smallest semantic processing units for AI to understand and generate text, are rapidly becoming a core commodity in the future digital world.
Cloud vendors providing Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) have become one of the biggest beneficiaries, monetizing through the sale of model call services and inference capabilities, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on March 16.
Benefiting from the popularity of AI agent products and the release of new models, Volcano Engine has raised its previously set 2026 MaaS revenue target of over 10 billion yuan ($1.45 billion), LatePost noted.
Meanwhile, local competitors such as Alibaba Cloud are also accelerating restructuring and expansion efforts, seeking to seize dominance in this rapidly growing emerging market.
($1 = 6.8900 yuan)
