Alibaba Unveils 10 Trillion Daily AI Calls and Record‑Breaking Hanguang 800 Chip at Cloud Expo

Today marks the second day of the Cloud Expo. Alibaba announced that its artificial‑intelligence services handle more than 10 trillion calls per day, serving one billion users worldwide, processing one billion images, 1.2 million hours of video, 550 000 hours of voice, and 500 billion natural‑language sentences, making it China’s largest AI company.

Alibaba also disclosed its complete AI roadmap, covering AI chips, AI cloud services, AI algorithms, AI platforms, and industry AI, all of which lead the market.

In the AI‑chip layer, Pingtouge introduced the world’s most powerful AI chip, the Hanguang 800, which breaks industry records for performance and energy efficiency; a single Hanguang 800 delivers the compute power of ten GPUs. The chip is already used in Alibaba scenarios, such as reducing the Taobao index time from one hour to five minutes.

In the AI‑cloud‑service layer, Alibaba Cloud—ranked among the global top three and first in Asia—has built the most comprehensive and largest AI cluster in the region, comprising GPUs, FPGAs, NPUs, CPUs, super‑computing clusters, and the third‑generation Shenlong architecture. Recently, it allocated nearly ten thousand GPUs for a viral app, setting a world record.

In the AI‑platform layer, the Feitian AI platform, Feitian Big Data platform, and AIoT platform dramatically lower AI development barriers. The Feitian AI platform is China’s first cloud‑based commercial machine‑learning platform, supporting billions of features and hundreds of billions of training samples, cutting training costs by 35 % and boosting training speed by up to 400 % in multiple scenarios, and it pioneered visual modeling on public cloud for a near‑local development experience.

In the AI‑algorithm layer, the DAMO Academy has achieved more than 40 world‑firsts in natural‑language processing, speech, and vision since its inception two years ago. Its NLP system surpassed human performance on the SQuAD reading benchmark, its speech technology was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 2019 Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies, its voice‑assistant outperforms Google’s, and its vision system can recognize over one million physical entities.

Alibaba’s AI serves both internal and external users. Internally, the Alibaba Xiaomai chatbot assists more than five million users daily across 132 countries and 11 languages, while Tmall Genie is the world’s largest Chinese smart assistant with over 20 million units sold. Autonomous driving is evolving toward vehicle‑road collaboration, and in 2018 Alibaba obtained the first unmanned‑driving road licence in Hangzhou.

Externally, Alibaba pioneered industry AI in 2015, integrating internet technology with traditional sectors and collaborating with partners to drive industry adoption. The “City Brain” initiative is now deployed in 23 cities, including Hangzhou, Haikou, Beijing, Shanghai, Lhasa, Macau, and Kuala Lumpur.

According to Jin Rong, director of Alibaba’s Machine‑Intelligence Lab at DAMO Academy, Alibaba’s AI creates a unique virtuous cycle that tightly links commercial opportunities with technological advantages.

Alibaba continues to invest heavily in talent and R&D, boasting more than ten IEEE Fellows, over thirty renowned university professors, and thirty national‑level experts, with more than 450 papers published at top international conferences. Over half of its workforce consists of R&D staff, and its research investment has ranked first among Chinese listed companies for three consecutive years.

In short, Alibaba’s AI ecosystem spans cutting‑edge chips, massive cloud infrastructure, powerful platforms, breakthrough algorithms, and widespread industry applications, illustrating its dominant position in the global AI landscape.