information:extraction
Cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology

In conjunction with the company's 10th anniversary, Alibaba launched Alibaba Cloud in September 2009, aiming to build a cloud computing service platform, including e-commerce data mining, e-commerce data processing, and data customization. It has R&D centres and operators in Hangzhou, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Silicon Valley and Dubai. In July 2014, Alibaba Cloud entered into a partnership deal with Inspur. Alibaba Cloud is the largest high-end cloud computing company in China. In 2009, Alibaba acquired HiChina, the largest domain registration service and web hosting service company in China, and built it into Alibaba Cloud. On 28 July 2011, Alibaba Cloud released AliOS (formerly Yun OS and Aliyun OS), a Linux distribution designed for mobile devices. In the 2017 Computing Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba launched AliGenie, a China-based open-platform intelligent personal assistant. It is currently used in the Tmall Genie smart speaker.

In 2018, Alibaba's Wanli Min presented City Brain, a technology geared towards urban solutions such as streamlining traffic, detecting accidents and improving transport efficiency.

China's government designated Alibaba as one of its "AI champions " in 2018.

On 27 July 2019, Alibaba unveiled a 64-bit RISC-V processor called the XuanTie-910 (Black Iron 910). It is a 12 nm 16-core with a clockrate of 2.5 GHz, and was designed by Alibaba's subsidiary T-Head (also known as Pingtouge). Alibaba claim the Xuantie-910 is faster than the ARM Cortex-A73 and is capable of 7.1 Coremark/MHz.

On 25 September 2019, Alibaba announced an AI accelerator called the Hanguang 800. The Hanguang 800 contains 17 billion transistors built with a 12 nm process and was designed by T-Head and DAMO Academy (Alibaba's research team). Alibaba claim it is capable of 78,563 images per second (IPS) inference and 500 IPS/W in ResNet-50. The Hanguang 800 will be available to be rented on Alibaba Cloud.

In April 2023, Alibaba revealed its plans to release Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-like chatbot. Its name means "seeking an answer by asking a thousand questions". This AI product, which can support both English and Chinese languages, will be incorporated into the company's various business operations. It will initially be integrated into the messaging app, DingTalk, and the voice-activated smart speaker, Tmall Genie. According to Alibaba, drafting emails, creating business proposals, and converting meeting dialogues into written notes are among Tongyi Qianwen's capabilities. Media reported that the company has received more than 200,000 requests from businesses to join its beta testing program, from industries as varied as fintech, electronics, transport, fashion and dairy farming as of April 2023. Alibaba is also integrating Tongyi Qianwen into a digital assistant called Tingwu. Tongyi Tingwu, the AI-powered assistant, can analyze multimedia content and generate a text summary from video and audio files.