AliCloud Teams w/ NVIDIA to Invest $1B in Cloud & Quantum Computing
AliCloud, the public cloud computing arm of the global ecommerce giant Alibaba, has teamed up with NVIDIA to invest $1B in cloud computing research and development.
AliCloud says that it will hire up to 1,000 data developers over the next 3 years, in efforts to compete against Amazon Web Services for public cloud supremacy.
The investments will directly impact AliCloud’s data analysis implementations that utilize machine learning. When you couple this news alongside the recent data center construction projects of AliCloud, it’s easy to see that AliCloud is serious about its intent to compete against AWS.
“AliCloud’s rate of growth is one of the fastest among global peers,” mentions Simon Hu.
“Apart from being fast-expanding in Asia, we will also maintain our growth in Europe and the Middle East,” Hu went on to say.
Bloomberg predicts that AliCloud revenues will reach $1B by 2018.
NVIDIA has agreed to help Alibaba innovate its AliCloud offering, giving its cloud to ability to provide deep learning capabilities for businesses.
AliCloud’s Quantum Computing Endeavors
AliCloud has also hinted that NVIDIA will assist in its quantum computing endeavors.
While quantum computing is an emerging technology, Alibaba may have plans to become one of first providers these impressive processing capabilities to governments and organizations all around the world.
Alibaba mentions that it has co-founded a quantum computing lab with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. NVIDIA will assist Alibaba in its high performance computing research and development.
As of now, AliCloud remains a small portion of Alibaba’s total sales. The last available sales figures peg AliCloud as contributing a mere 3.1% of Alibaba’s total revenue.
If AliCloud can become the cloud provider that delivers quantum computing as a service, Alicloud could very well achieve its goal of becoming a dominant player in the cloud services industry.
