China’s tech companies vie for attention on CCTV’s festival gala, the year’s biggest stage

Chinese tech companies are competing to make their mark during the Spring Festival Gala presented by state-run broadcaster CCTV, a variety show and annual spectacle that provides a rare nationwide marketing opportunity, like the Super Bowl in the US, and is also an unmistakable signal of political alignment with Beijing’s industrial priorities.This year, ByteDance’s cloud computing arm, Volcano Engine, secured an “exclusive AI cloud partnership” with the gala, scheduled for Monday, taking the baton from last year’s sponsor Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and artificial intelligence unit of Alibaba Group Holding. This comes as demand for computing power surges, and China’s major cloud-service providers are locked in an increasingly fierce rivalry.ByteDance, the parent of Douyin and TikTok, is using the occasion to showcase its full-stack AI capabilities. In the run-up to the holiday, the company unveiled Seedance 2.0, a video-generation model that drew widespread attention globally, and on Saturday it released updated Doubao-Seed 2.0 series models.In a promotion for its consumer-facing Doubao app, the company plans to distribute more than 100,000 tech products, including drones, electric vehicles, robots and 3D printers, along with digital red envelopes worth up to 8,888 yuan (US$1,286) through lucky draws on Monday.The gesture faces off against Tencent’s Yuanbao and Alibaba’s Qwen AI apps, which before the holiday rolled out giveaways worth 1 billion yuan and 3 billion yuan, respectively, in cash and vouchers, as the ancient tradition of lucky money found a new battleground in the AI era.Excluded by the CCTV-ByteDance partnership, Alibaba sought other avenues for Qwen, sponsoring galas organised by local broadcasters in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Henan. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.Humanoid robots are expected, once again, to entertain audiences after a Yangge folk dance performed by Unitree robots on last year’s stage went viral.