The Hanguang 800 is being implemented across many application scenarios within Aliyun, ranging from video classification to smart city applications. For example, the company's popular Pailitao platform applies visual image search to e-commerce, allowing customers to search for items by taking a photo of the query object. Using AI-based image recognition & indexing powered by the new Hanguang 800, Aliyun can increase image processing efficiency by 12 times compared to GPUs. With regard to smart city tech, Aliyun says it previously used 40 traditional GPUs to process videos of central Hangzhou with a latency of 300ms. Now the task requires only four Hanguang 800 with a lower latency of 150ms.

Alibaba is well aware of the growing demand for dedicated compute to power today's AI applications. Last year, the Hangzhou-based tech giant launched its semiconductor subsidiary Pingtouge ("Honey Badger" in Chinese) to develop embedded chip and neural network accelerators. At the time, Alibaba CTO Jeff Zhang pledged Pingtouge would produce the world's most advanced neural network chip by the middle of this year. Today, Alibaba kept its promise. At the Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Apsara Conference 2019, Pingtouge unveiled its first AI dedicated processor for cloud-based large-scale AI inferencing.