Alibaba to supply AI and data tech to Chinese deep space exploration and smart city projects

Alibaba will be among 13 businesses working with the Hangzhou government on a'brain' for the city and will work with the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC) on deep space exploration projects, it announced at its annual Computing Conference this week. According to the retail and cloud computing giant, it will be supplying a range of its tech services such as AI, deep learning and data storage. The B2B technology supply side to the Alibaba business is growing fast and puts it very much in battle with Amazon on a global playing field. The Hangzhou City Brain project is a new government initiative to address its urban city living issues, such as traffic congestion. It will use Alibaba Cloud's AI program "ET" and big data analytics capabilities to perform real-time traffic prediction by using its video and image recognition technologies.