To help create a sustainable and inclusive 11.11 Festival, Alibaba Cloud, the digital arm of Alibaba Group, fully migrated all of Alibaba Group’s systems and operations onto the cloud for the world’s largest shopping festival.
Green steps
The Group’s use of 100% cloud-native technologies during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival reduced the use of computing resources by 50% for every 10,000 transactions in comparison to last year. Computing efficiency was greatly improved, with a boost of 20% in technology deployment efficiency and 30% in CPU resource utilisation, marking the Group’s attempts to move toward a more sustainable and inclusive 11.11 Festival.
“We are committed to offering ‘green computing power’ to meet the exponential demand from our customers for a low-carbon digital transition, and to drive the sustainable and inclusive development of our society,” said Li Cheng, Chief Technology Officer, Alibaba Group.
Alibaba Cloud used green technology, such as liquid cooling and wind power in its data centres, to reduce the Festival’s environmental impact. The use of renewable energy in Alibaba’s Zhangbei County data centre helped to reduce carbon emissions by over 26,000 tons.
The scaled deployment of Hanguang 800, Alibaba Cloud’s first artificial intelligence (AI) inference chip, improved efficiency of product searches and recommendations, reducing the energy used by 58%. The company’s AI M6 model improved AI-intensive operations, driving efficiency improvements in the production chain. It is estimated that M6-enabled designs, when incorporating use of more eco-friendly materials, can reduce the carbon footprint of T-shirt manufacturing by more than 30%. The various initiatives marked Alibaba Cloud’s continued support for online retailers.
Accessible shopping
Enhanced speech recognition technology developed by Alibaba DAMO Academy was deployed on the Taobao app. The voice assistant can recognise Chinese-language commands in a wide range of local accents with a high accuracy rate. The voice assistant eliminates the need for users to enter text manually, addressing a pain point for elderly users who struggle to type on mobile devices.
A new “image search for medicine” feature that also benefits the elderly was introduced on the Taobao app. Users can search for over-the-counter medicine by taking or scanning a photo of packaging or containers using Pailitao, the Taobao app’s image search engine.
Putting innovation into application
Alibaba’s last-mile logistics vehicle Xiaomanlv was deployed at over 200 campuses across China to support package delivery. Over 1 million packages were delivered by 350 Xiaomanlv vehicles during the festival’s initial 10-day period, surpassing the entire package delivery volume of the 12 months since the logistics robot was launched in September 2020.
