The Chinese Alibaba is not simply saying "Open Sesame" to gain access to the cloud-- instead the Chinese search giant is betting $1 billion on Nvidia GPUs to power its cloud and artificial intelligence efforts.
The company will also enlist around 1000 developers to work on its big data platform during the next 3 years. Such efforts will be run by Alibaba subsidiary AliCloud, and will be offered from datacentres across the world. According to the South China Morning Post the initial Nvidia-powered AliCloud product offering involves a "Big Data Platform" consisting of 20 solutions covering the data development chain.
"The Big Data Platform fulfills our vision of sharing our vast data troves that will create immense value to our users," AliCloud president Simon Hu says. "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."
In addition Alibaba and Nvidia plan to establish a joint research and technology development lab in order to further take advantage of GPUs in the creation of deep learning and other HPC applications.
Go AliCloud Launches Big Data Platform (South China Morning Post)
Go Alibaba's AliCloud Bets on GPUs for AI
Go AliCloud
