Hong Kong-based AI company, SenseTime, recently launched one of Asia’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in Shanghai’s Lin-gang Free Trade Zone.
Spanning a total area of 130,000 square meters and constructed with $880 million worth of investments, the center houses 5,000 computer racks. It is also among the strongest data centers in Asia thanks to its infrastructure with a designed computing capacity of 3.74 exaFLOPS.
The data center’s strongest selling point is its ultra-speed — it can train models with 100 billion parameters, enabling the production of millions of business models for companies in various sectors, particularly, bio-medicine and automotive.
“Industries like bio-medicines and physics need AI to help them explore the next step. We have already cooperated with the National Center for Protein Science to help them in their research and development,” said SenseTime co-founder and vice president, Yang Fan.
It is also eyed to cut down line loss rate by about 50% and save some 45 million kilowatt-hours of its yearly power consumption. Shanghai Supercomputer Center director Li Genguo said that while traditional algorithm methods cost a lot of energy, AI computing is more eco-friendly by using a high-speed CPU accelerator.
The China Academy of Sciences released a report that projected the value of the country’s core AI industry to hit $63 billion by the end of 2025. Together, these efforts reflect Shanghai’s goal to advance AI.
