ByteDance Expands Cloud Business to Automobiles

Chinese media outlet 36Kr reported on Monday that ByteDance has recently launched its own automobile cloud business and begun to scout staff from Amazon Cloud and JD Cloud for the project. Meanwhile, ByteDance has initiated talks with a new vehicle manufacturer and autonomous shipping firm in regard to their “smart driving cloud” initiative.

ByteDance anticipates its cloud business will gradually cover more than half of the country’s users between 2023 and 2025, which would put it on par with Tencent in terms of total revenue.

In September last year, 36Kr has reported that the first move of ByteDance’s business aiming at in the automotive field was to set up a networking team for its ventures into the vehicle industry. According to sources, the team has about 50 R&D personnel, with branches in Beijing and Shanghai, and has also launched the “Volcano Auto Entertainment”, an application that would support a vehicle network.

“Volcano Auto Entertainment” integrates most of the products ByteDance offers, including Douyin, Xigua (watermelon) Video, Toutiao, and others. The application has already been installed on several vehicle products offered by Geely, Chang’an and other car companies.

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Sources told 36 Kr that the application has been loaded on more than 100,000 products at present, but it only has a few thousand active daily users. Sources also revealed that the scenes and simulation capabilities in ByteDance’s automobile cloud come from Qcraft, an autonomous driving company in which Bytedance has invested in March this year.

According to a report released by market research company Canalys, China’s cloud infrastructure market increased by 54% in the second quarter of 2021, reaching 6.6 $billion.