Alibaba sets up largest intelligent computing center

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, 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 US tech company Google's 9 EFLOPS and electric vehicle maker 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 intelligent computing 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 autonomous region, with computing power reaching 3 EFLOPS.