Byte Doubao is going to appear on the Spring Festival Gala.
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Author | Wang Xiaojuan
Editor | Huang Yu
The Spring Festival Gala, with an audience of one billion, is evolving from a traffic amplifier in the mobile internet era to a technological touchstone in the age of AI. In 2026, ByteDance seems eager to take over from Unitree, becoming the company in the spotlight for the new year.
On December 23, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine will become the exclusive AI cloud partner for the 2026 China Central Television Spring Festival Gala. ByteDance’s intelligent assistant, Doubao, will also launch a variety of interactive features.
ByteDance’s combination of Volcano Engine and Doubao for this Spring Festival Gala appearance comes at a time when internet giants are fiercely competing in AI. For ByteDance, this partnership not only serves as a validation of Volcano Engine’s technology, but also helps push its AI-to-C product Doubao to a broader user base.
Recently, Volcano Engine announced that the daily token usage for Doubao’s large model has exceeded 50 trillion, more than ten times the amount from the same period last year. In the past year, Doubao’s large model made a leap forward, and Volcano Engine has also become the number one company in China’s public cloud market share.
As one of the earliest AI products directly targeting consumers, Doubao has already built up a considerable user base. According to QuestMobile’s Q3 2025 AI Application Industry Report, Doubao leads the list with 172 million monthly active users, surpassing Deepseek’s 144 million.
A year before Volcano Engine became the exclusive AI cloud partner of the Spring Festival Gala, AI technology had already shown its potential during the 2025 Gala. Alibaba Cloud, as the exclusive cloud computing AI partner, used AI technology to achieve visual effects like “bullet time.”
On the consumer side, Alibaba also made extra efforts in the second half of this year. Since November, it has fully entered the AI-to-C market. Official data shows that “Qianwen,” in its 23-day public beta, exceeded 30 million monthly active users (across APP, Web, and PC), becoming the world’s fastest-growing AI application.
After all, as AI technology matures, the competition focus of internet giants has shifted from model development to capturing the entry point. Naturally, the nationally prominent stage of the Spring Festival Gala has become a battleground for these companies. ByteDance and Alibaba, now regarded by the industry as key contenders in China’s AI field, see securing the Spring Festival Gala as a critical competition point.
Reviewing the history of Spring Festival Gala collaborations since 2015, the changes in partnership content mirror the evolving hot topics of the internet industry.
From the rise of online payments to the boom of short video, and now the popularization of AI technology, each stage can find its counterpart on the Gala stage.
In 2015, WeChat teamed up with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, allowing users to snatch red envelopes via “shake.” Official data shows there were 11 billion user interactions on New Year’s Eve, with more than 200 million users linking their bank cards to WeChat Wallet.
This battle was described by Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma as a “Pearl Harbor sneak attack plan,” and it cemented WeChat’s position in mobile payment. The next two years saw Alipay become the exclusive interaction platform for the Gala, with the “Collect Five Blessings” campaign becoming a hot topic. In 2018, Taobao partnered with the Gala, distributing over 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes.
After the era of payments, Douyin (TikTok) took the stage, announcing the competition of the short video era.
In 2019, Douyin, as the exclusive social media dissemination platform, and CCTV jointly launched the “Another Happy Year” new media campaign, with total video views reaching 24.7 billion. This occurred as competition in the short video industry was heating up, allowing Douyin to gain a significant boost in users thanks to the Gala.
Two years later, in 2021, Douyin appeared again at the Spring Festival Gala, this time as the “Exclusive Red Envelope Interactive Partner,” distributing 1.2 billion yuan in red envelopes on New Year’s Eve. This was both a promotion of Douyin’s payment system and a way to consolidate its traffic.
Now, after several twists and turns, as AI competition becomes exceptionally intense, AI is becoming the “main character” in Spring Festival Gala sponsorships.
With the Gala’s backing, AI-to-C products have the potential to become national-level products, just like WeChat and Alipay in the payments era, Douyin in the short video era, etc.
In fact, during the 2025 Spring Festival, AI assistants had already shown signs of mass adoption, with DeepSeek’s sudden rise becoming the biggest topic of the holiday. The 2026 Gala might become a turning point for AI assistant popularization. The prerequisite, however, is that AI interactions must be sufficiently simple, interesting, and valuable to attract users of all ages.
The performance of Volcano Engine and Doubao at the Gala will be an important window to observe the maturity of AI technology. If they can smoothly handle Gala-level traffic surges and provide a good user experience, it will greatly accelerate the popularization of AI technology.
Next, the spotlight is on ByteDance, and so is the challenge.
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