XPeng, Alibaba Cloud set up China’s largest computing center for autonomous driving

Beijing (Gasgoo)- On August 2, XPeng and Alibaba Cloud announced the completion of their jointly built autonomous driving intelligent computing center, Fu Yao, located in Inner Mongolia. 

Photo credit: XPeng

The center is built in Ulanqab City, the center of Inner Mongolia. The city holds unique advantages in location and climate, which serves mega data centers perfectly. Currently, there are twelve big data centers in the city, including centers from Alibaba Group and Apple.  

Combining Ulanqab’s climate with green technologies such as air cooling, AI temperature adjustment, and modularization, the Fu Yao center is able to realize fresh air operation for over 80% of the time annually. Its annual average PUE is less than 1.2. 

XPeng and Alibaba Cloud’s center offers 600FLOPS of computing power. It will be used to train XPeng’s autonomous driving model for that the huge computing power can accelerate the training by 170 times. The greatly shortened training time will evidently promote the development of autonomous driving technologies in China. 

The blooming development of artificial intelligence has facilitated the application of intelligent computing. 

According to the statistics from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, more than 20 intelligent computing centers have been built or are under construction in China, covering Gansu Province, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Area, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing Area, and other national computing hubs.