Alibaba and Nvidia have teamed up again, expanding their collaboration in AI and robotics. The two companies announced at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou that Nvidia’s embodied AI tools will be integrated into Alibaba Cloud’s machine learning platform. The move gives developers access to Nvidia’s toolkit for building AI systems that interact with the physical […]
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday that the Pentagon will no longer allow Chinese nationals to work as coders on Department of Defense (DoD) cloud systems, ending a controversial practice that critics warned carried security risks. For years, a programme loosely modelled on Microsoft’s internal arrangements let foreign nationals, including developers in China, contribute […]
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Microsoft has stopped letting engineers based in China provide technical support for US military cloud systems. The company made the change following concerns about security risks tied to its work with the Department of Defense. The shift came just days after ProPublica published a detailed report describing how Microsoft relied on its team in China […]
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Unisplendour Corporation, a Chinese cloud computing and IT infrastructure company, is planning a Hong Kong listing to raise around $1 billion. According to Bloomberg, the company has approached several banks to pitch for roles in the potential listing, although details such as size and timing are still being discussed. Unisplendour is currently listed on the […]
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China Telecom, a state-owned carrier, has developed two LLMs that were entirely trained on domestically produced processors. This breakthrough demonstrates China’s progress toward chip independence, particularly in the field of AI. The company’s AI Institute announced that its open-source model, TeleChat2-115B, along with another undisclosed model, was trained on tens of thousands of Chinese chips.… Read more »
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The Biden administration is conducting a review of China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom due to concerns that these companies could take the American data they access through US cloud and internet providers and provide it to Beijing. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department is carrying out this previously… Read more »
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Spending on cloud infrastructure services in mainland China hit $9.2 billion USD (£7.29bn) in the third quarter of 2023 accounting for 12% of global cloud spend, according to analyst firm Canalys. The three largest vendors in China – Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent – represent almost three quarters (73%) of the market and customer spending. Alibaba… Read more »
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Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has unveiled its latest AI image generation model, Tongyi Wanxiang (‘Wanxiang’ means ‘tens of thousands of images’). The cutting-edge generative AI model is now available for enterprise customers in China for beta testing. In addition, the cloud pioneer announced the launch of ModelScopeGPT, a versatile framework designed… Read more »
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Dell has prioritized growing its presence within the Chinese market targeting SMBs and public sector organizations, according to China Daily.
Speaking at the China Big Data Industry Summit in Guiyang, Dell CEO Michael Dell announced the launch of a new company, alongside its local partner, to gain traction within the lucrative market. Guizhou YottaCloud Technology will now act as a means for Dell to access the local market, prioritizing small and medium-sized enterprises and local governments in the first instance.
“China will play an increasingly important role in the big data era and the United States-based tech giant will speed up efforts to develop new products for the market,” said Dell at the conference.
Dell is one of a number of organizations who have prioritized local partnerships in the Chinese market, as locals tend to favour Chinese businesses and technologies over foreign counterparts, quoting security as the main driver. The country itself is a big draw for Dell as a business, representing its second largest market worldwide, only behind the US. The company also highlighted in September it plans to invest $125 billion in the Chinese market over the next five years, with cloud computing being the focal point.
Last year Dell launched it’s ‘In China for China’ strategy, which not only included the above investments, but also a drive from its Venture Capital arm in China to encourage entrepreneurialism, expanding its R&D function in the country, as well as establishing an artificial intelligence and advanced computing joint-lab, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The AI research will focus on the areas of cognitive function simulation, deep learning and brain computer simulation.
“The Internet is the new engine for China’s future economic growth and has unlimited potential,” said Dell in September. “Being an innovative and efficient technology company, Dell will embrace the principle of ‘In China, for China’ and closely integrate Dell China strategies with national policies in order to support Chinese technological innovation, economic development and industrial transformation.”
Alibaba Cloud Computing (Alicloud) is to launch 20 new online services to the Chinese market under the brand name Big Data Platform.
The new application service range caters for activities in the data development chain, including processing, analysis, computing, machine learning and big data hosting. Around 1,000 developers are expected to be developing services with AliCloud in the next three years.
The plan is to use all the data-processing capacity and data-security skills that the Alibaba Group has accumulated in ten years of running the world’s biggest ecommerce platform, AliCloud president Simon Hu told reporters at the launch. “That data becomes a resource and a service that we can provide our clients,” said Hu.
Meanwhile, AliCloud is working with US chip specialist Nvidia to develop China’s first GPU-based, high-performance computing cloud platform. Along with offering clients GPU-accelerated computing services AliCloud aims to remove the data bottlenecks that handicap many chinese companies, according to Hu.
The Nvidia GPU-based services could also improve the computing capacity of many of Alibaba’s typical users in China, such as manufacturers and distributors, said Hu. “Right now, AliCloud mainly serves internet companies, but our next step will be to also provide cloud computing services to traditional industries such as manufacturing to remove the computing limitations that these companies may face,” said Hu.
The new launch puts AliCloud in direct contention with big data service supplier Data Mall, a start-up that recently launched an online mall for big data assets. The Data Mall cloud offering helps service providers and independent researchers to trade intelligence and market information. Consulting firm Guan Zheng Hang Seng says the Beijing Datatang owned Data Mall service now has 460,000 users supplying raw data to its platform.
A study by Forrester Research forecast that the enterprise cloud service market in China will be worth $3.8 billion by 2020, more than double its estimated size of $1.8 billion last year. According to Forrester analyst Charlie Dai AliCloud now has the Chinese market’s biggest range of public cloud services and alliances with service providers.