As Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU, Beijing throws its weight behind ISA A major policy directive strongly suggesting use of the royalty-free architecture is apparently imminent Systems05 Mar 2025 | 15
Chinese AI marches on as Baidu makes its chatbot free, Alibaba scores Apple deal New ‘Deep Search’ thinking and planning bot to go up against peoples’ champion DeepSeek AI + ML14 Feb 2025 | 2
Chinese clouds target small and medium enterprises in APAC in search of growth Canalys Forums APAC Smaller buyers see deep discounts and suddenly worry less about regulatory issues Off-Prem05 Dec 2024 |
Alibaba Cloud brings chatty SaaS products out of China and into more markets Teams-like DingTalk gets an enterprise edition, and virtual Androids unleashed SaaS25 Nov 2024 |
Chinese engineers wire Raspberry Pi into 600-meter railway tunnel to find any holes The GPIO turns out to be a handy tool if you want to measure the conductivity of concrete On-Prem29 Oct 2024 | 31
Alibaba Cloud claims its modular datacenter architecture shrinks build times by 50 percent Also reveals boosted utilization rates, upgraded IaaS and more – all in the name of AI apps Off-Prem20 Sep 2024 | 4
China's tech giants buy into Indonesia – just like US tech giants did in India GoTo commits to the Alibaba Cloud, and Alibaba promises not to sell its stake SaaS18 Sep 2024 |
Alibaba Cloud waiting for hardware to dry out before trying to restore customer data Digital Realty's Singapore disaster still complicating cloud after a week Off-Prem17 Sep 2024 | 8
Alibaba Cloud boosts failure prediction with logfile timestamps Machine learning helps, but more data catches more faults - so Chinese champ has shared its data Devops03 Sep 2024 | 2
When it comes to cloud, it's China against the world Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate the west, but the Middle Kingdom plays by its own rules Off-Prem21 Aug 2024 | 6
Alibaba and Tencent clouds see demand for CPUs level off, GPUs accelerate Lenovo also cashes in on AI demand, without being able to turn it into profit Off-Prem20 Aug 2024 |
Alibaba Cloud claims K8s service meshes can require more resources than the apps they run SIGCOMM 2024 Built its own replacement – Canal Mesh – that it says leaves Google's Istio and Ambient eating dust Cloud Infrastructure Month12 Aug 2024 | 9
Alibaba Cloud closing Australian and Indian datacenters Prioritizing Mexico and Southeast Asia Off-Prem01 Jul 2024 | 2
Alibaba Cloud reveals its datacenter design, homebrew network used for LLM training Exclusive 15,000 GPUs per DC, in hosts packing eight apiece, plus nine NICs – helped by switches with custom heat sinks Systems27 Jun 2024 | 6
Alibaba Cloud unleashes thousands of Chinese AI models to the world Like Bedrock or Azure OpenAI Studio – but with the added fun of geopolitical risk Off-Prem25 Jun 2024 |
Alibaba Cloud built its edge network hardware on Intel Ethernet ASICs Custom 2U boxen with Tofino inside are in production and mean Chinese cloud has more space for servers Off-Prem28 May 2024 |
Alibaba is taking its cloud to Mexico, likely following Chinese manufacturers More AZs in its Asian backyard also planned Off-Prem24 May 2024 | 3
Two weeks ago, Alibaba Cloud bragged its AI was soaring. Now it's slashing prices ByteDance added a cheap service and the market followed it down AI + ML22 May 2024 | 1
Alibaba Cloud details storage tech that's doubled its VMs per host Exclusive Using one disk as a write cache eases stresses created by manycore CPUs Off-Prem02 May 2024 | 3
Alibaba Yitian 710 rated fastest Arm server CPU in the cloud (for now) Researcher finds it beats Intel's Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win Off-Prem29 Apr 2024 | 6
Alibaba Cloud reveals network telemetry tool that helped cut number of engineers needed by 86% Exclusive Zoonet employs 'elegant generalization of ping and traceroute' among other tricks Off-Prem16 Apr 2024 | 4
Alibaba Cloud slashes prices outside China Domestic customers saw their fees cut last January Systems08 Apr 2024 |
Alibaba bins listing for its Cainiao logistics limb Already backed away from cloud spinout, now gradually breaking up with its own breakup plan Off-Prem27 Mar 2024 |
French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC €15.99/month server offered with Ubuntu or Debian, and a zero percent Service Level Agreement Systems04 Mar 2024 | 7
Alibaba Cloud cuts prices – hard – for multi-year commitments in mainland China This might solve its twin problems of low growth and short-term customers Off-Prem29 Feb 2024 |
Alibaba cancels cloud spinoff, blames US chip sanctions Export curbs strike again and stock prices come tumbling down PaaS + IaaS16 Nov 2023 | 2
Alibaba Cloud to bring its AI PaaS out from behind the Great Firewall Meanwhile its parent begins to break up, with float of logistics arm Off-Prem27 Sep 2023 | 1
Alibaba CEO, chair and head of breakway cloud biz quits suddenly ahead of IPO Daniel Zhang does different handover to the one expected Cloud Infrastructure Month11 Sep 2023 | 1
China iPhone curbs reportedly extend to local government and state-owned businesses Asia In Brief ALSO: Alibaba Cloud succession plan overturned; Fujtisu’s Thai takeaway; Australia takes on PayPal Legal11 Sep 2023 | 7
Alibaba says demand for cloud has dipped – which improved its profits What? How? Off-Prem11 Aug 2023 | 4
Alibaba boss steps down to become boss of Alibaba Cloud Near-flop of China shopping fest suggests cloud and AI are the priority growth engines Off-Prem21 Jun 2023 | 1
Alibaba plans to spin off cloud division within 12 months Approves breakup after missing revenue estimate PaaS + IaaS19 May 2023 | 1
US sanctions cut Huawei profits by half in first quarter The Chinese tech giant has 'yet again increased investment in R&D' to make up for technology losses Networks28 Apr 2023 | 10
China's Alibaba Cloud cuts prices in bid to lure customers Only in the Middle Kingdom as company reportedly eyes IPO PaaS + IaaS26 Apr 2023 |
Alibaba Cloud to offer custom LLMs-as-a-service 'Tongyi Qianwen' will drive cloud consumption, industry-specific AI, and smarter smart speakers AI + ML11 Apr 2023 | 3
Alibaba to separate into six parts. Take that HP and IBM, with your puny two-way splits Cloud and AI bundled into an entity that’s free to seek its own funds or list Off-Prem29 Mar 2023 | 4
AWS adds Superapp Grab's Asia-centric maps to its cloudy location service Asia In Brief PLUS ServiceNow makes Japan a discrete region; Alibaba Cloud’s Singapore hub; US snipes at Korean network policy; and more Software16 Jan 2023 | 1
Refrigeration failure at Hong Kong datacenter takes out Alibaba Cloud and others Unlike Oracle and Google, this time there's no heatwave to blame Off-Prem20 Dec 2022 | 1
Fujitsu to test robot datacenter inspector that – trust us – won't take your jobs Robots aren't hard. 5G in a room full of metal is. So is explaining why you need a bot to look at blinkenlights Networks08 Nov 2022 | 14
Alibaba Cloud plans for a fifth of its servers to use homebrew Arm CPUs by 2025 Sanctions? What sanctions? Just look at the low, low, power consumption figures PaaS + IaaS04 Nov 2022 | 4
Alibaba Cloud goes even more serverless as it tries to become a utility Laptop-shaped thin client tied to DaaS also illustrates the concept, and its downsides Off-Prem03 Nov 2022 | 2
Oracle and Huawei clouds the big movers on Gartner's conjured quadrilateral AWS warned for burning customers, Azure for 'punitive' licensing, while Google's losses are a worry Off-Prem01 Nov 2022 | 7
Xi Jinping hails 'improved cyber ecology', says state to direct strategic tech research Asia In Brief Samsung and TSMC hit with chip tech patent suit; Ant Group's DB hits AWS; PayPal drops Hong Kong rights group; and more Security16 Oct 2022 | 5
Alibaba Cloud reveals billion dollar 'ecosystem upgrade' It's mostly a channel program with a fancy name, plus more outposts Channel26 Sep 2022 | 1
SoftBank offloads part of Alibaba stake to raise much-needed cash Invested $20 million in 2000 and will pocket $34 billion and keep a slice worth more than that – for now Off-Prem11 Aug 2022 | 9
China's internet companies are decelerating cloud consumption, says Alibaba Starts chasing industrial digitization as its next big opportunity Off-Prem05 Aug 2022 | 4
Alibaba execs hauled in to discuss Shanghai Police data leak Asia In Brief Plus: Weibo cracks down on political puns; Singaporean crypto biz Vauld restructures; Philippines fights Facebook rumors Security18 Jul 2022 | 2
Alibaba joins rivals in offering tool for those under pressure to reduce carbon emissions Microsoft, Amazon and Google all have products showing the damage you do and now so does Softbank offshoot PaaS + IaaS04 Jul 2022 | 4
TikTok US traffic defaults to Oracle Cloud, Beijing can (allegedly) still have a look Alibaba hinted the gig was worth millions each year Legal20 Jun 2022 | 9
Alibaba Cloud challenges AWS with its own custom smartNIC Who'll board the custom silicon bandwagon next? Networks14 Jun 2022 |
Alibaba continues international expansion – adds two datacenters and a bank Bit barns in Saudi Arabia, all-digital bank in Singapore Off-Prem08 Jun 2022 |
Lenovo infrastructure group and Alibaba Cloud both make first annual profits Chinese giants' enterprise businesses do well despite lockdowns. Other segments? Strap in for a bumpy ride Off-Prem27 May 2022 |
Alibaba Cloud adds third datacenter in Germany More Euro-presence than any other Chinese company, but still nowhere near Google or AWS PaaS + IaaS17 May 2022 | 1
Cloud a three-player market dominated by AWS, Google, Microsoft Big three’s market share now at 65 percent almost everywhere outside China PaaS + IaaS02 May 2022 | 4
Alibaba Cloud gets more of Android working on RISC-V silicon Cameras, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth are operational – maybe China’s wider tech independence plan is, too OSes27 Apr 2022 | 5
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba makes 9 datacenter energy patents available Part of a Low Carbon Patent Pledge with Meta, Microsoft, and others Systems22 Apr 2022 | 7
Alibaba Cloud's homegrown Arm CPUs emerge in VM trial Yitian 710 chip boasts 128 Armv9 cores, available to test PaaS + IaaS14 Apr 2022 | 4
Alibaba Cloud opens first South Korean datacenter Better late than never – all its global and Chinese hyperscale rivals are already there Off-Prem31 Mar 2022 |