ByteDance quietly makes $4bn a year from AI. It just broke up an app to make more.

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, now generates about $4bn annually from artificial intelligence, the largest figure any Chinese firm has publicly claimed, according to the South China Morning Post. To press that lead, ByteDance is restructuring by folding its Lark workplace app into the teams behind its Doubao chatbot and cloud business, as confirmed by an internal memo. The move aims to boost AI product competitiveness and signals that the chatbot and cloud, not the office suite, are the company's future.

ByteDance is quietly winning a race in China that most people are watching in America. The company behind TikTok now makes about $4bn a year from artificial intelligence. That is the largest figure any Chinese firm has publicly claimed, the South China Morning Post reported https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3362417/bytedances-us4b-projected-ai-revenue-tops-china-it-restructures-office-tool-lark . To press that lead, ByteDance is tearing up part of its own structure. It is folding Lark, its Slack-style workplace app known as Feishu at home, into the teams behind its Doubao chatbot and its cloud business. The plan comes from an internal memo seen by the paper. Absorbing the office app The reshuffle is telling. Lark’s product team will merge into the group that runs Doubao, ByteDance’s answer to ChatGPT, under Zhao Qi, who until now oversaw Doubao alone. Lark’s sales and support staff move to Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud arm, to sell AI models and software to businesses. Its engineers join Flow, a division focused on AI apps. In plain terms, ByteDance is breaking up a standalone product and redistributing it around AI. The company said the goal was “stronger AI product competitiveness and customer service capabilities.” The message to staff is clear. The chatbot and the cloud, not the office suite, are the future. Big in China, small next to the US The $4bn puts ByteDance ahead of China’s better-known AI names. It is more than DeepSeek https://thenextweb.com/news/deepseek-funding-pause-viral-posts-liang-wenfeng , Moonshot https://thenextweb.com/news/white-house-moonshot-banned-nvidia-chips-kimi-k3 or Alibaba have disclosed. But it is still tiny beside the American leaders. OpenAI and Anthropic each run at many times that. The figure says more about the gap with US AI https://thenextweb.com/news/china-ai-gap-us-record-low-6-percent-bloomberg-intelligence than about any Chinese lead. Money is the thing China’s labs keep circling. Most give their best models away to win users. They are only now working out how to charge for them https://thenextweb.com/news/chinese-ai-paid-weights-open-model-licensing-goldman . A firm that can already book $4bn has a head start. A bet across the whole stack The restructure is one piece of a larger push. ByteDance is spending across every layer of AI at once, from frontier models and its Seedance video generator to infrastructure and chips. The Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/fde2dd97-317a-41b8-a746-d917c5680397 reported the effort in detail, and noted that some see it as a big gamble. The video bet is already visible. ByteDance’s Seedance model is powering a wave of AI-made short dramas https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3362333/how-bytedances-seedance-model-empowers-chinas-nascent-ai-comic-drama-industry in China, compressing months of production into weeks. The research firm DataEye expects China’s AI short-drama market to reach 40 billion yuan $5.9bn this year, with viewers already past 600 million. Set alongside its other AI experiments https://thenextweb.com/news/bytedance-anew-labs-ai-drug-discovery , it points to a company trying to be everywhere in AI at once. The Lark reshuffle is simply where that ambition met the org chart. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.