International tech giants to establish AI centers in Shanghai

SHANGHAI, Sept. 17 - Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, and several other international tech giants announced to establish AI-related innovation centers and research institutes in Shanghai at the on-going World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a secure cloud services platform within Amazon.com, announced to establish the AWS AI research institute in Shanghai, the first in the Asia-Pacific.

The AWS AI research institute will conduct multi-language natural language processing research centered on Mandarin Chinese and provide an open source deep learning ecosystem to help Chinese customers launch AI and machine learning applications.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AWS, said they had cooperated with some Chinese companies like TuSimple, an autonomous truck solution provider, and smart financial technology company CreditX, who use AWS machine learning and AI cloud service to structure their key business applications.

"With the AI research institute established, we will cooperate closely with the AWS Chinese team and China's business and academia," he said.

Microsoft announced to establish Microsoft Research Asia-Shanghai and the Microsoft-INESA AI Innovation Center in Shanghai, bringing world-class AI research capabilities to the city.

The center aims to convert AI research achievements into applications, which will help Shanghai become a domestic-leading and world-leading source of AI innovation and talent pool.

Chinese tech companies including Alibaba and Baidu also announced plans to establish AI innovation centers in Shanghai. Baidu will establish its Shanghai innovation center, developing over 110 AI projects. Sense Time Group, a Chinese AI company, is developing its new supercomputing center in Shanghai, which will have a computation power of more than 500 petaflops (a petaflop is 1,000 trillion) per second.

Shanghai has been accelerating the development of the AI industry. AI-related industries in Shanghai have scaled up to 70 billion yuan (10.3 billion US dollars) by July this year, according to Shanghai's Municipal Commission of Economy and Information.