China’s tech giants report huge gains from Spring Festival marketing blitz

China’s “big tech” giants – including Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings – released preliminary figures showing impressive gains for their new flagship artificial intelligence offerings during this year’s Spring Festival Gala marketing blitz.

While red packet giveaways and extensive advertising campaigns have been a fixture of past Lunar New Year holidays, this year’s multi-billion-yuan competition surrounding a crop of new artificial intelligence products was so intense that China’s top market regulator stepped in to warn against “cutthroat competition”, or neijuan.

TikTok-owner ByteDance was one of the first to report its gains, after its cloud computing unit Volcano Engine and consumer AI app Doubao were featured continuously during Monday’s Spring Festival Gala staged by state broadcaster China Central Television.

According to ByteDance, there were 1.9 billion interactions across its AI services on the day, with Doubao seeing 63.3 billion tokens processed per minute at its peak on the night.

Tokens are the fundamental units of data read or generated by AI models, equivalent to small chunks of text or pixels in an image. In comparison, ChatGPT developer OpenAI said in October that it processed 6 billion tokens per minute through its application programming interface, or API.

Alibaba gave out 3 billion yuan in consumption vouchers for users of its new consumer AI app Qwen. Photo: Shutterstock Images

ByteDance’s viral video generation model Seedance 2.0 was also closely integrated with the gala’s programming that night, with several pre-recorded segments generated by the model.

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