Alibaba Boasts Advanced Technologies for Double 11 Shopping Festival

Alibaba hosted a double 11 technology conference Tuesday to talk about its cutting-edge technological innovations applied in this year’s double 11 shopping festival. 

Alibaba’s double 11 event has become the biggest digital innovation project in the world, said Alibaba’s CTO Li Cheng. The unique operating system is accelerating the digitalization and process of businesses going online, he said. 

Thanks to the digital business operating system, Alibaba completed the biggest cloud practice during double 11, significantly saving time, resources and cost.

In addition, the application of AI computing brought scale and efficiency to a new level and united digital supply chain and logistics systems – this year, the fastest completion of a double 11 order, from confirmation of order to package delivered, only took 10 minutes. 

In addition to its business operating system, Alibaba has also launched other revolutionary projects to bring customers better and more efficient shopping experiences during this year’s double 11 shopping festival, such as the first real-time AI translation livestream, a virtual live-streamer and visual AI technology that facilitates fabric factories’ quality control. 

The conference also showcased the top 10 technologies involved in this year’s double 11, including a cognitive intelligence engine, logistics robots and liquid-cooling data centers, etc. 

Five super data centers in North China’s Zhangbei and Ulanqab, South China’s Heyuan and East China’s Nantong and Hangzhou will operate to support the computation of this year’s double 11 shopping frenzy, said Ming Zhou, Alibaba’s vice president and head of Alibaba Cloud.

SEE ALSO: Alibaba’s Double 11: Much More Than a Shopping Festival

This year, Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent robot also got upgraded to be faster and more efficient. It is capable of automatically changing failing hardware in just four minutes, Zhou said.

Alibaba Cloud’s data center in Hangzhou was officially put into use in September, providing services in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, among others. Alibaba claimed the data centers use the world’s largest server using liquid-cooling technology. This form of heat conduction efficiency reduces the failure rate by 50%. Tens of thousands of liquid-cooling servers will be used for computation during this year’s double 11 shopping festival, the company said. 

Zhou said the technological advances used in double 11 will also be introduced to the public to support the establishment of digital infrastructures in China.

During Alibaba Cloud’s Computing Conference, Yunqi Conference, in September, Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said that Alibaba Cloud had entered a 2.0 era where corporations can be equipped with intelligent, digital, mobile, IoT and cloud capacities that can help them reach a wider public.