Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) will work with NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) on cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bloomberg Business reports.
Alibaba Cloud Computing (AliCloud), a subsidiary of Alibaba that was formerly known as Aliyun, will invest $1 billion on Big Data cloud technologies for businesses. Big Data refers to extremely large or complex sets of information that can be analysed with high-performance computers to spot patterns, trend and associations.
“The Big Data Platform fulfils our vision of sharing our vast data troves that will create immense value to our users,” AliCloud president Simon Hu said at the launch in Shanghai. “What we want to do at Alibaba is turn the data-processing capacity and data-security capabilities that we’ve accumulated over the last decade into a product, so that data becomes a resource and a service that we can provide our clients.”
Hu added that, apart from being fast-expanding in Asia, Alicloud will also maintain its growth in Europe and the Middle East. According to Bloomberg Business, cloud computing services currently account for only 3.1% of Alibaba’s sales, but could account for more than $1 billion of Alibaba’s revenue by 2018.
In October, Alibaba announced that it would open its second Silicon Valley data center to meet rising cloud demand. The public cloud presents a $120 billion global market opportunity, and Alibaba is gearing up to compete with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), whose web services revenue rose to $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2015. According to Bloomberg Business, AliCloud hopes demand for processing and storage from governments and businesses can propel growth during the next decade, thereby increasing its competitiveness against Amazon.
At the same event, Alibaba announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia. AliCloud and Nvidia will collaborate in developing the first GPU-based, high-performance computing cloud platform in China.
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