Over the past three years, Volcano Engine president Tan Dai has repeated the same cycle when setting revenue targets for his team’s model-as-a-service (MaaS) business.
At the start of each year, he sets an ambitious goal. The team thinks it is too difficult to hit. By midyear, the target starts to look achievable, and Volcano Engine raises it again.
At the start of 2026, ByteDance’s video model Seedance 2.0 gave Volcano Engine an early boost. As a latecomer to China’s cloud market, Volcano Engine has leaned into artificial intelligence to drive MaaS growth.
Since the second half of 2025, coding and video models have opened up more use cases for commercial production. That shift has shown the market that the boundaries of model capabilities remain hard to predict. For MaaS providers, top-tier models are now a central growth driver.
At Volcano Engine’s Force Conference on June 23, ByteDance unveiled its next-generation flagship model, Doubao-Seed-2.1 Pro. The release also means that, beyond video generation, ByteDance has addressed a gap in its model lineup: coding.
