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Vincent Chow

Chinese tech giant ByteDance has more than doubled the number of tokens processed by its flagship Doubao large language models (LLMs) in the past six months, highlighting a surge in artificial intelligence use among Chinese consumers and placing it among the top global hyperscalers.
Doubao’s average daily token usage jumped from 12.7 trillion tokens in March to over 30 trillion tokens in September, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud unit president, Tan Dai, said at a corporate event on Thursday.
That represented a 253-fold increase from Doubao’s daily average in May 2024, equalling the daily average total for all of China in late June.
Tokens are the basic units of data processed by AI models – comparable to a pixel in an image, a snippet of sound, or a word in a sentence. For chatbots, a billion tokens equates to around a million conversations.
Tokens are also the standard billing units for using AI models through application programming interfaces (APIs).
The figures support an earlier statement by Alibaba Group Holding CEO Eddie Wu Yongming, who said overall token consumption in China was doubling every two or three months as AI adoption across industries grew faster than any previous technology in history. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The surge puts ByteDance among the world’s biggest token processors.

By comparison, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April that Azure AI Foundry handled 50 trillion tokens a month, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last week the company processed 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month across its products – or about 43.3 trillion per day.
According to research firm IDC, Volcano Engine led China’s cloud market for token processing in the first half of 2025, with a 49.2 per cent share. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Cloud followed with 27 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively.
Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba.
However, token volume is only one measure in China’s crowded AI cloud landscape. Across seven industry reports published since April, Alibaba Cloud, Volcano Engine and Baidu Cloud each topped different metrics depending on the research methodology used.
For instance, a recent report from research firm Omdia ranked Alibaba Cloud first, with about one-third of China’s AI cloud market in the first half of the year – more than the combined share of its three nearest competitors.
Another study by consultancy Frost & Sullivan, focusing solely on tokens processed by each company’s own models, found Alibaba’s Qwen leading with a 17.7 per cent share of daily token usage, followed by Doubao at 14.1 per cent and DeepSeek at 10.3 per cent.
Doubao, which shares the same name as the ByteDance LLM, is currently China’s most popular AI app, with more than 157 million monthly active users.
ByteDance, meanwhile, has repeatedly slashed API prices since its launch in August 2023, including a 99.3 per cent price cut in May 2024 that sparked an industry-wide price war.
IDC predicted China’s AI cloud market would reach 48.24 billion yuan (US$6.7 billion) by 2028.
“The LLM cloud service market has the potential to grow more than a hundredfold,” said IDC China research director Lu Yanxia in comments to domestic media.


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A surge in activity on ByteDance’s Doubao model shows how rapidly AI tools are entering daily life in China


A surge in activity on ByteDance’s Doubao model shows how rapidly AI tools are entering daily life in China.


ByteDance’s Doubao doubles token use in six months as China’s AI boom gathers pace

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A surge in activity on ByteDance’s Doubao model shows how rapidly AI tools are entering daily life in China

A surge in activity on ByteDance’s Doubao model shows how rapidly AI tools are entering daily life in China