ByteDance Shifts AI Resources to Enterprise Services as Douyin Faces Margin Pressure

According to ChainCatcher citing LatePost, ByteDance is redirecting its AI resource allocation from consumer-facing products like Douyin to enterprise-focused services, driven by high operational costs and profitability challenges. Douyin's daily active users exceed 200 million but daily losses reach tens of millions of yuan due to high inference and multimodal compute costs, while revenue from e-commerce and other channels totals less than 1 million yuan daily.

Meanwhile, ByteDance's video generation model Seedance demonstrates strong profitability. Leveraging its efficient MoE architecture with 200 billion parameters and lower inference requirements, Seedance 2.0 achieves a gross margin of 70% with the vast majority of revenue from enterprise clients. Current annualized revenue reaches 2 billion dollars. ByteDance has expanded its large language model data curation team to over 3,000 people and elevated Volcano Engine's MaaS business to higher priority, with top management setting targets to increase revenue tenfold and accelerate international expansion.