“The Chinese group Alibaba was awarded the contract for a major federal IT project two weeks ago. The fuss about the decision is premature.
The decision caused astonishment. Two weeks ago, the Federal Chancellery published the names of the companies on the Simap Internet platform that had received orders for a major federal IT project. This involves the outsourcing of data and applications to the public cloud.”
Read the full article @ NZZ (paywall):
“China’s “Sputnik Moment” is what Kai-Fu Lee, author of the famous book AI Superpowers, likes to call it. Five years ago, when AlphaGo—an artificial intelligence–based program developed by DeepMind, a startup that Google acquired in 2014—defeated two of the world’s best human exponents of the board game Go, it came as an eye-opener to China and its A.I. community.
Soon after, the Chinese government launched an ambitious Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to build China’s A.I. ecosystem, promising policy support, central coordination, and investments that are slated to cross the $150 billion mark by 2030. The goal: China’s A.I. industry should generate 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) of annual revenues, with related industries crossing 10 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) in annual sales, by the end of this decade.”
Read the full article @ Fortune:
“The government in Bern awards a major contract for cloud services to five companies. One of them: the Chinese provider Alibaba. Now one wonders in the country whether the data is safe there.”
Read the full article @ Süddeutsche Zeitung:
“ChemChina, a state-owned enterprise, has filed for an IPO of Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of agricultural chemicals, which it bought for $43 billion in 2017 (a deal that Fortune chronicled in detail). It remains China’s biggest foreign acquisition. Now the IPO could be one of China’s biggest.”
Read the full article @ Fortune (paywall):
