Alibaba Group taps cloud technology for 11.11 Global Shopping Festival

Alibaba Cloud says that it fully migrated all of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s systems and operations onto the cloud ahead of the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.

This it claims, reduced computing resources by 50% for every 10,000 transactions compared to last year.

There was also a boost of 20% in technology deployment efficiency and 30% in CPU resource utilisation. 

“We are committed to offering ‘green computing power’ to meet the exponential demand from our customers for a low carbon digital transition, and to drive the sustainable and inclusive development of our society,” says Li Cheng, Chief Technology Officer, Alibaba Group (pictured above).

“Our 11.11 Global Shopping Festival is an important opportunity to continue pushing our boundaries with green technology and smart innovation. We’re excited to serve more customers with these proven technologies across all industries and sectors.”

Alibaba Cloud tapped the likes of liquid cooling and wind energy at its datacentres to make 11.11 a more sustainable affair.

This year, the use of renewable energy in Alibaba’s Zhangbei County datacentre helped to reduce carbon emissions by over 26,000 tons.

The scaled deployment of Hanguang 800, the first AI inference chip launched by Alibaba Cloud in 2019, significantly improved efficiency of product search and recommendations during the event. The algorithm performance for the search function on Taobao marketplace improved by 200%, while energy costs were reduced by 58%.

Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large scale AI model M6 also made its debut during this year’s festival, which improved AI intensive operations such as apparel design.

Elsewhere, speech recognition technology developed by Alibaba DAMO Academy was deployed as part of the new ‘senior mode’ on the Taobao app, which aims to make it easier for China’s growing elderly population to adapt to digital life.

And Alibaba’s last mile logistics vehicle Xiaomanlv was deployed at over 200 campuses across China to support package delivery.

Over one million packages were delivered by 350 Xiaomanlv vehicles during the festival’s initial 10-day period, surpassing the entire package delivery volume of the 12 months since the robot was launched in September 2020.