“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 Alibaba plans to acquire a stake of up to 9.99% in Swiss duty free group Dufry, Dufry said on Monday, as it announced a new Chinese joint venture with the tech giant.
“Alibaba Group and Dufry AG (Dufry) have agreed to enter into a collaboration to jointly explore and invest in opportunities in China to develop the travel retail business and to enhance Dufry’s digital transformation,” Dufry said in a statement.
The Swiss firm has reeled under the hit of COVID-19 and plans to ask shareholders on Oct. 6 to fund a buyout of its Hudson Ltd unit via a new rights issue.”
Read the full article @ Reuters:
“Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) said it will invest 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) in its cloud infrastructure over three years – a plan that follows a boom in demand for business software as the coronavirus outbreak peaked in China.
The company said in a statement it will spend the funds on semiconductor and operating system development as well as building out its data centre infrastructure.”
Read the full article @ Reuters:
“Just a few months since China’s president Xi Jinping announced blockchain as one of the country’s technological priorities and advocated to “seize the opportunity”, there has been a lot of progress on the main blockchain initiatives and most of them will be in production very soon.
The ultimate goal is to enable and establish the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and large Chinese enterprises like Tencent, Huawei, Baidu and Ant Financial as the world leaders in new-breed payments infrastructure with unique features, to undermine the significance of the U.S. dollar as a global trade currency with the launch of Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) and to establish Chinese blockchain technical standards which will help adopt and scale the technology faster.”
Read the full article @ Forbes:
“With decoupling in trade and technology proceeding apace, China’s focus on this critical component of its hi-tech development reflects a desire to be self-sufficient. But technology warfare based on techno-nationalism benefits no one in the end.”
Read the full article @ South China Morning Post:
“The notion of a national team is usually associated with sports teams representing the nation on the global stage for a shot at glory. These days, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments all the rage, nations are creating national teams for the race towards AI superiority. Amidst all the hype that one is exposed to in the media over the possible doomsday scenario about how AI could ruin our lives, governments and businesses across the globe are rapidly positioning themselves to ride the next wave of change.
In 2017, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) handpicked 4 of its technology giants, forming a ‘national team’ to lead the way in building open innovation platforms that are accessible through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This initiative was created to foster participation and hence innovation in sectors that will increasingly be powered by AI technologies in an effort to support the entrepreneurship of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This national team is expected to contribute in areas such as research and development, sharing data, open source software and ecosystem participation. Moreover, MOST is very supportive in encouraging the deployment of these technologies at the provincial level. This includes providing resources and access to city infrastructure to allow for proof of concepts to scale. (DigiChina, 2019)”
Read the full article @ SMU Artificial Intelligence Club on Medium:
