This week’s news roundup highlights Alibaba’s strategic moves across multiple fronts during the Chinese New Year season. We delve into Taobao’s new interactive gifting features, Tmall Luxury’s premium offerings for high-end consumers, and Alibaba Cloud’s pivotal role in powering the Spring Festival Gala. Additionally, we cover Alibaba Cloud’s international launch of the Container Compute Service (ACS) and its new partnership in the Ultra Accelerator Link™ Consortium, advancing the future of AI and cloud computing.

Stay tuned for the latest in consumer engagement, luxury trends, and cutting-edge technology.

Alibaba’s Action for CNY: Engaging Consumers Across Multiple Platforms

The Chinese New Year(CNY) season presents one of the major opportunities to engage with consumers and capitalize on the festive boom in consumption. Here’s a breakdown of how various business groups within the company are aligning their strategies to make the most of this key period:

• Taobao and Tmall: Engaging Consumers through Interactive Experiences
  Taobao has introduced a special “gift-giving” function to tap into the gifting culture during CNY, capitalizing on the festive spirit to drive engagement and sales. This feature is designed to offer a seamless and personalized shopping experience for users looking to purchase presents for their loved ones. In tandem with this, Taobao has become the exclusive e-commerce interactive platform for CCTV’s renowned Spring Festival Gala, the most-watched television event in China. This partnership will significantly enhance Taobao’s visibility and drive further consumer interaction through live streaming and other interactive features. The rules for the interactive games—where viewers can win red packets and share in a pool of 2.5 billion yuan—will be announced on January 17 and go live on January 21, promising to capture the attention of millions across the country.
• Tmall Luxury: Bringing Exclusivity to the Festive Season
  Tmall Luxury is also in full swing this CNY, with over 1,000 new products launched to cater to the high-end consumer market. These offerings, which include limited edition products and luxury goods tailored to the holiday, are aimed at consumers looking to treat themselves or their loved ones to something special for the new year.
• Alibaba Cloud: Powering the Gala’s Digital Experience
  Alibaba Cloud is crucial in powering the Spring Festival Gala as the exclusive cloud computing and AI partner. This collaboration underscores Alibaba Cloud’s technological capabilities and reinforces its position as a leader in cloud infrastructure, ensuring smooth digital operations for the event, which is expected to reach millions of viewers. This partnership will likely have long-term benefits, further establishing Alibaba Cloud as an essential player in large-scale, high-profile events.
• Cainiao: Handling the Logistics of a Massive Shopping Surge
  Cainiao is seeing a surge in CNY-related products being shipped to its overseas warehouses as early as December, preparing for the spike in cross-border shopping. The logistics network ensures that products are efficiently distributed to meet the high demand from both domestic and international customers.
• Freshippo: Bridging the Gap for HK Consumers
  Freshippo (also known as Hema) has launched a new initiative in Shenzhen with free shuttle bus routes designed to facilitate Hong Kong consumers’ access to its stores. This move caters to the growing demand for high-quality food and goods from Freshippo, providing a convenient shopping experience for consumers from Hong Kong who are eager to celebrate the holiday with premium products and fresh goods.

Alibaba Cloud Unveils Revolutionary Container Compute Service (ACS) for International Customers

Alibaba Cloud has announced the international debut of its innovative Alibaba Cloud Container Compute Service (ACS), a cloud-native serverless container service that enhances the scalability and efficiency of cloud infrastructure for application development using container technology.

As container technology becomes increasingly mainstream in application deployment, its adoption is growing rapidly. According to Gartner, the container management market has experienced over 20% growth in the past year. Gartner also predicts that by 2027, more than 75% of all AI deployments will utilize container technology as the underlying compute environment.

ACS seamlessly integrates container services with cloud computing resources, eliminating the complexities of managing the underlying infrastructure. It significantly reduces operational costs and simplifies the technical aspects of using container technology, allowing developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. By offering on-demand resource scaling, ACS enables enterprises and developers to optimize costs, potentially savings of up to 55% in overall computing expenses.

One of the early adopters of ACS, Moka, a leading HR management SaaS company in China, has already experienced significant benefits of this service. The maintenance-free nature of ACS clusters has allowed Moka to focus on its core business priorities. At the same time, the on-demand scaling and pay-per-use billing model have provided the flexibility needed to manage fluctuating demand, especially during peak recruitment seasons.

“As the deployment of workloads on container technology becomes increasingly prevalent, we developed a more accessible solution that would anticipate the evolving needs of our customers,” said Jiangwei Jiang, General Manager of Infrastructure Products, Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud Joins Global Tech Giants to Enhance Next-Generation AI Cluster Performance

Alibaba Cloud has been elected as a new board member of the Ultra Accelerator Link™ Consortium (UALink™), a global open industry standard group that includes leading companies such as AMD, Astera Labs, AWS, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft. This strategic partnership will focus on advancing the development and industry adoption of UALink, a high-speed, scale-up interconnect designed to enhance the performance of the next-generation AI cluster. The UALink 1.0 Specification, scheduled for release during the first quarter of 2025, will enable up to 200Gbps per lane scale-up connection for up to 1024 accelerators within an AI pod. This collaboration is expected to drive significant advancements in AI and high-performance computing, establishing a new benchmark for industry performance.

“Alibaba Cloud believes that driving AI computing accelerator scale-up interconnection technology by defining core needs and solutions from the perspective of cloud computing and applications has significant value in building the competitiveness of intelligent computing supernodes,” said Qiang Liu, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud, General Manager of Server Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Founded in May 2024, the UALink Consortium aims to develop technical specifications that facilitate breakthrough performance for emerging AI usage models while fostering an open ecosystem for data center accelerators. This collaboration underscores Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to driving innovation and leadership in AI and cloud computing technologies.