Highlights from the First China Computing Conference: Cloud Computing as the Foundation of the Digital Economy

Recently, the first China Computing Conference was held in Jinan, Shandong. In the main forum, Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and founder of Alibaba Cloud, delivered a keynote titled “Digital Economy: From Power to Computing”. He compared today’s digitalization to the electrification of a century ago, noting that the combination of data resources and computing power dramatically reduces traditional resource consumption; from 2010 to 2018 global compute grew 500% while the associated energy increase was only 6%.

Wang emphasized that cloud computing is the foundation of the digital economy, just as electricity underpinned the industrial economy, and that computing will become a key metric for economic development in the digital era.

Alibaba Cloud’s senior product R&D leader Cao Zheng and data‑center researcher Qu Haifeng also attended the sub‑forum and gave speeches on practical intelligent computing services and sustainable cloud computing with carbon‑neutral development.

The conference announced the first batch of “Innovation Pioneer” outstanding achievements. Alibaba Cloud’s immersion liquid‑cooling solution (Panjiu) and the Zhenduan heterogeneous computing platform were selected as excellent low‑carbon and system‑type results, respectively, and were displayed in the exhibition area.

Panjiu Immersion Liquid‑Cooling Solution uses full‑immersion cooling technology, submerging servers in insulating coolant, achieving near‑zero cooling energy consumption and eliminating the need for fans, air‑conditioners, or chillers. Its annual PUE is below 1.09, far surpassing the national average, reduces server failure rates by 50%, and improves reliability. Alibaba opened the technology specifications to the public in 2020.

Zhenduan Heterogeneous Computing Platform provides a unified compilation and software‑hardware co‑optimization framework for data‑center, edge, and AIoT scenarios, enabling efficient integration with various accelerators and seamless migration. It abstracts hardware differences for algorithms and applications, allowing rapid deployment across multiple machine‑learning frameworks. The platform has produced nine papers at top international conferences and secured 24 patents.

In the MLPerf open benchmark, Zhenduan processed 1.078 million images per second, breaking the world record for image‑classification performance, and achieved multiple first‑place results in MLPerf Inference 2.0 (2022) and MLPerf Tiny v0.7.

Alibaba Cloud continues to build a robust technology foundation, having developed its own cloud operating system (Feitian), a self‑designed general‑purpose CPU (Yitian 710), and a data‑center‑specific processor (CIPU) slated to become the core of cloud control and acceleration.

The event concluded with a showcase of the “Innovation Pioneer” exhibition, highlighting Alibaba Cloud’s cutting‑edge solutions and its role in powering global digital transformation.