Alibaba Cloud sets its VMware partnership snowballing with hybrid storage appliances

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has spun out a business called Lingyang Intelligent Service Company that aims to deliver "data-as-a-service."

Lingyang starts its life with assets adapted from tools developed for Alibaba’s own extensive operations, which span e-commerce, a public cloud, logistics, web portals, payments, and plenty more besides.

The Chinese company has over 1.3 billion annual active customers – more than a billion in China. Serving all those customers – and their many transactions – has necessitated development of some pretty slick tools.

Alibaba's financial services affiliate, Ant Group, has open sourced its "privacy-preserving Computation Framework."

The goal of the release, according to an Ant announcement, is "to make the technologies more accessible to global developers and speed up the framework's application."

The Framework, called SecretFlow, can be found on both GitHub and China's analog Gitee. In the repos you'll find code for:

Alibaba's cloud business and financial services affiliate Ant Group has expanded further out of China this week, by opening a pair of datacenters in Saudia Arabia and a digital wholesale bank in Singapore.

Alibaba Cloud and Saudi Telecom Company (STC) have opened two cloud services in Riyadh which will serve as a regional hub as part of a joint venture called the Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC). STC confirmed the launch on Tuesday and the joint venture, SCCC, shared scenes from the launch.

Other businesses playing a part in SCCC are eWTP Arabia Capital, the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), and the Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE).

Alibaba is being sued in the US by the parents of a man, who bought a 3D printer from the Chinese e-commerce giant, and died in an accident after the device allegedly malfunctioned and caught fire.

Hoi Kwong Yu and Janice Yu, parents of Calvin Yu, claim their son purchased "a defective Tronxy X5SA 24V 3D printer" from Alibaba's website AliExpress.com around 9 November 2019. Disaster struck six months later, on 11 June 2020.

The device was plugged into an electric power strip, and overheated causing a fire to erupt in Calvin's home, it was alleged in court documents filed to San Francisco's Superior Court [PDF]. He died a day later.

Ever since Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server business in 2014, one thing has proven elusive: profit.

Now the company can point to a pair of consecutive quarters, and a full year, in the black.

The Chinese kit-maker yesterday reported Q4 and FY 2022 results, with quarterly revenue of $16.7 billion representing seven percent year on year growth. Annual revenue reached $71.6 billion, an increase of 18 percent. Annual net income topped $2 billion.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has open-sourced a federated learning platform it claims protects privacy by enabling the development of machine learning algorithms without having to share training data.

FederatedScope was developed by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, the global science and technology research outfit it founded in 2017, and the source code for this is now published under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

The platform is described as a comprehensive federated learning platform that provides flexible customization for a variety of machine learning tasks in both academia and industry.

Alibaba's DingTalk collaboration suite has entered "extended reality" with a new offering powered by smart glasses.

DingTalk offers messaging, video conferencing, and other collaboration tools.

Released yesterday, "DingTalk XR" extends the DingTalk experience into what the company has called "extended reality" by running on smart glasses from an outfit called Rokid.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal. 

The patents Alibaba is giving to the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) mostly involve parts of its own in-house "soaking server" liquid immersion cooling system developed in 2015 that Alibaba claims reduced its datacenter energy expenditure by 70 percent.

Two of the nine patents were unrelated: one limits hard drive power consumption, and another was designed to improve hardware utilization rates. 

Alibaba Cloud has opened its first datacenter in South Korea.

As is nearly always the case when hyperscalers expand their physical footprints, the company has said nothing about where the facility is located, or its capacity. Sadly, the company is also silent on whether it has brought its flagship immersion cooling to South Korea. It is also unclear if all Alibaba Cloud products, or a mere subset, are offered in South Korea. We've asked the company to clarify matters.

One product that Alibaba has definitely deployed in South Korea is its "China Gateway" – a service that allows users to operate resources on Alibaba Cloud inside China with Alibaba assisting with local compliance chores, while maintaining secure and dedicated links to cloudy resources outside the Middle Kingdom. The service even offers the chance to rent office space from WeWork inside China, and to arrange local logistics. Alibaba Cloud suggests the service is a fine way for web-based businesses to enter China.

Alibaba Cloud has brought its palm-sized Wuying cloud client device to Singapore – its first foray outside China.

Wuying was revealed in September 2020. The tiny device was suggested as a way for consumers and businesses to break free of PC upgrade cycles. Instead, it allows them to run a virtual desktop streamed from the Alibaba Cloud and endure a cabled connection to a local monitor and input devices.

In 2021 Alibaba offered a sequel: an all-in-one Wuying that offered the cloudy client plus a large touch screen. Accompanying the device was a Cloud Workplace that offers cloud storage and offers admins the chance to manage Wuying devices remotely.