Green Computing Strategies and Cloud‑Native Architecture at the 2022 China Computing Power Conference

He Zhengyu, Chair of Ant Group's Infrastructure Committee and head of Green Computing, opened his talk by emphasizing the rapid growth of computing demand and its associated carbon and energy costs, noting that inefficient server usage imposes heavy societal and corporate burdens.

Ant Group responded by adopting a cloud‑native architecture upgrade that unified all applications onto a single, standards‑based platform, enabling a flexible, scalable resource pool and dramatically improving server utilization from 8% in 2017 to over 30% in 2021.

The green‑computing stack includes three core technologies: (1) time‑slice scheduling that dynamically allocates resources to match peak usage patterns, (2) AI‑based elastic capacity forecasting to anticipate demand spikes, and (3) offline‑online mixed deployment that isolates workloads while maintaining high utilization, achieving up to 70‑80% offline usage without performance degradation.

These innovations yielded concrete environmental benefits—reducing 394 tons of CO₂ during a single Double‑11 event and saving nearly 30 000 tons annually—while Ant Group opened several patents and open‑source projects (OceanBase, MOSN, Kata Containers, and the privacy‑preserving framework “YinYu”) to promote industry‑wide adoption.

Looking ahead, Ant Group is extending green‑AI research, optimizing AI model inference and training for efficiency, and collaborating with universities to foster academia‑industry partnerships that further the development of sustainable, high‑performance computing.