Report: Volcano Engine's revenue is expected to double this year to 25 billion, with usage almost equal to the sum of Alibaba and Baidu

ByteDance's Volcano Engine is set to hold the 2025 Original Power Conference in Beijing from June 11 to 12, where the Doubao family will undergo a comprehensive upgrade. This young cloud vendor is challenging the traditional cloud computing market landscape with its aggressive low-price strategy and strong growth momentum.

According to recent reports from "Highlight," Volcano Engine's revenue scale is expected to exceed 12 billion yuan in 2024, with a revenue target of over 25 billion yuan in 2025, achieving double growth. This scale will be very close to Baidu Intelligent Cloud, which is projected to have a total revenue of 21.8 billion yuan in 2024, with multiple institutions estimating a 30% growth to around 28 billion yuan in 2025.

Even more noteworthy is Volcano Engine's performance in large model invocation volume.

According to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) titled "Analysis of the Chinese Public Cloud Large Model Service Market Landscape, Q1 2025," the invocation volume of large models in China's public cloud is expected to reach 114.2 trillion tokens in 2024.

In terms of market share for large model invocation volume, Volcano Engine holds a dominant 46.4% market share, ranking first, surpassing the combined total of Baidu Intelligent Cloud (19.3%) and Alibaba Cloud (19.3%). The remaining 15% is shared among other vendors such as Tencent Cloud, Mobile Cloud, and Tianyi Cloud.

Price War Becomes a Killer Weapon, Offering 20% Discounts to Poach Competitors

Volcano Engine's rapid rise is attributed to its "simple and brutal" low-price strategy.

Since May last year, Volcano Engine has taken the lead in initiating a price reduction trend for large models, with enterprise market pricing set at 0.0008 yuan per thousand tokens. In March of this year, it announced a 50% reduction in fees for some large model batch inference services.

Reports citing multiple industry insiders reveal that Volcano Engine frequently targets customers of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud with significantly lower prices, offering discounts of 20% to 30%, or even lower.

This strategy has proven effective. In March 2025, the daily invocation volume of Doubao large models reached 12.7 trillion tokens, a nearly 100-fold year-on-year increase.

Dual Advantages of Human Resources and Capital Support Expansion

Volcano Engine's confidence in the price war comes from the strong support of its parent company, ByteDance. In terms of human resources, reports indicate that Volcano Engine is the only Chinese tech cloud vendor that is expanding its workforce against the trend, currently boasting a product and R&D team of over 10,000 people, with a sales and operations team nearing 2,000, surpassing the human resource reserves of Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Tencent Cloud.

Its financial strength is even more robust. Backed by ByteDance (which foreign media reports indicate will achieve a profit of 241.56 billion yuan in 2024), Volcano Engine's financial power far exceeds that of its peers.

AI Agent Becomes a New Focus

At the upcoming 2025 Original Power Conference, Volcano Engine will showcase the comprehensive upgrade of the Doubao family, covering cutting-edge technologies such as AI Coding and AI Agent.

According to Securities Times, the main forum of this conference will consist of three parts: new product launches, AI Coding, and AI Agent (intelligent agents). Notably, the top two core topics highlighted by Volcano Engine for this Original Power Conference are also related to Agents In addition, the main forum and sub-forums will cover various topics such as AIoT hardware, AI applications, AI video, and large model security.

Two months ago, Volcano Engine announced the launch of the enterprise data intelligence agent Data Agent, which, based on the capabilities of large model reasoning, analysis, and invocation tools, can deeply understand business needs and automate tasks such as writing in-depth research reports and designing marketing activities.

The rise of Volcano Engine is reshaping the landscape of China's cloud computing market. The market, originally dominated by Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud, is being disrupted by this young player.

Rapid Rise of Volcano Engine

Volcano Engine is the cloud service platform under ByteDance. Volcano Engine opens up the growth methods, technical capabilities, and application tools accumulated during ByteDance's rapid development to external enterprises, helping them build digital capabilities such as experience innovation, data-driven approaches, and agile iteration.

On June 22, 2020, Volcano Engine officially launched. On the afternoon of June 28, 2023, it launched the enterprise-level large model service platform "Volcano Ark."

CITIC Securities stated that ByteDance has become a leading force in AI development in China, with its models and applications advancing together, continuously bringing fresh blood to the development of China's AI ecosystem, and reflecting the current vigorous development of AI in the country.

IDC reports show that industry enterprises and organizations are actively introducing generative AI use cases. Eighty percent of enterprises plan to introduce more generative AI in the next 18 months, and the adoption rate across various functional departments is expected to increase.