Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, has launched the world’s largest intelligent computing center in Zhangjiakou’s Zhangbei county, Hebei province, which can offer up to 12 EFLOPS (12 quintillion floating-point operations per second) of AI computing power, surpassing Google’s 9 EFLOPS and Tesla’s 1.8 EFLOPS. An EFLOPS rating is a direct mathematical measurement of a computer’s performance, in terms of a processor’s ability to calculate 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second. A 3 EFLOPS computer, for example, means that its processor can handle 3 quintillion floating-point calculations every second on average.
Alibaba said the Zhangbei intelligent computing center will provide services for artificial intelligence-powered large-scale model training, autonomous driving, spatial geography and other AI-related frontier applications. It has also unveiled another intelligent computing center in Ulaanqab, Inner Mongolia, with computing power reaching 3 EFLOPS.
Computing power, or the ability to process data, is widely regarded as a vital foundation for bolstering the development of the digital economy and a new engine to unleash the potential of data as a factor of production. Cai Yinghua, President of Alibaba Cloud Global Sales, said 58% of Chinese enterprises have leveraged AI technologies, which far surpasses the global average of 35%. Meanwhile, accelerated digital transformation and popularization of intelligent applications have sped up data generation, thus creating strong demand for enhanced computing power. The two super-intelligent computing centers are powered by Alibaba’s Feitian intelligent computing platform, which can increase the utilization rate of computing power resources by more than three times and AI training efficiency by 11 times thanks to its advanced technical architecture.
China’s total computing power now ranks second in the world, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). By the end of 2021, super-large and large data centers in use exceeded 450 nationwide, while intelligent computing centers surpassed 20, the Ministry said. The market scale of China’s computing power industry exceeded CNY1.5 trillion last year, with cloud computing surpassing CNY300 billion and internet data center services over CNY150 billion, said the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as reported by the China Daily.
