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In focus
- ByteDance tests whether Seedance can pull customers deeper into its enterprise offerings
- A look back into the pressures that could force an AI-video shakeout this year
- Singapore’s Volta Infra raises US$300 million for AI infrastructure
Hello reader,
There’s a coffee shop in my city that became known for its croissants. The pastry proved so popular that its owners opened a dedicated bakery next door. They’ve also recently gone a step further by opening a new burger joint.
The logic is easy to follow: When one product becomes a hit, use it to pull customers into another business.
ByteDance has a similar strategy for Seedance, the firm’s AI video generation model. Seedance has become a major revenue driver, and the company hopes that demand will open doors for BytePlus, its international cloud platform.
However, enterprise customers can use an AI model and not move their servers, databases, and security systems to the same provider. ByteDance could get lots of customers to use Seedance, but there’s no guarantee of a wider customer relationship.
In today’s top story, I examine whether Seedance can become a lasting foothold for BytePlus. While the firm’s rival Alibaba entered the AI boom with established cloud customers to sell new products to, ByteDance appears to be building its cloud business in reverse. It’s using a hit AI product to create those relationships.
Seedance has enterprise demand. The bigger question is whether that demand can pull customers deeper into BytePlus.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
Top Story
ByteDance has a billion-yuan wedge, but is it a cloud strategy?
Image credit: Ulla
Vietnamese enterprise AI platform Diaflow’s experience with BytePlus illustrates ByteDance’s problem. Seedance and other ByteDance models handle most of Diaflow’s video and image-generation workloads, but the company has kept its databases, computing infrastructure, and core applications on Amazon Web Services.
The same divide appears at market level in China, where ByteDance dominates the requests sent to AI models, but Alibaba still owns much more of the infrastructure surrounding them.
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