When Intel Corp. announced last week that its field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, would now power the acceleration service for Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, it was yet another chapter in an evolving collaboration between the chip maker and China’s e-commerce powerhouse. The service is an important part of Alibaba’s cloud architecture, as it allows customers to deploy artificial intelligence and video analytics, key areas of focus for Intel and its own global client base.

“Cloud service providers, like Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our fastest-growing customers over the past five years. In the near future, we expect this trend to grow,” said Peter Chen (pictured, right), senior director of products and technology, Data Center Group Sales, at Intel.

Chen visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, left) at The Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China. They discussed the Intel-Alibaba collaboration, smart city software projects and a recent AI-based global competition. (* Disclosure below.)

Designed CPU for Alibaba Cloud

Intel’s collaboration with the e-commerce firm took a major step forward last year when the company released its first custom-designed CPU for Alibaba’s cloud platform. The two companies have also established a joint research center focusing on cloud computing and “internet of things.”

“We have very close collaboration with them, sharing our hardware roadmap, as well as software, to make sure they can take full advantage of it,” Chen said.

One example of a jointly coordinated software initiative between the two companies involves Alibaba’s City Brain project. The smart city initiative applies analytics, AI and deep learning to help solve car congestion problems using data gathered from traffic signals and surveillance cameras.

Intel has been working with Alibaba to leverage new technologies in search of solutions for City Brain. “Everyone knows that Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort to engage the software ecosystem,” Chen said. “We’re working with cloud service providers, like Alibaba in China, to create the latest software.”

Intel’s collaboration with Alibaba has also extended to an entrepreneurial competition. Teams from around the globe participated in a contest to develop AI tools that can assist healthcare providers with the examination of medical images for lung cancer.

“We had an overwhelming turnout, with 3,000 teams from over 20 different countries,” Chen said. “If we’re able to simplify lung cancer image recognition to provide this as a tool … imagine how much this will change a patient’s diagnosis.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of The Computing Conference. (* Disclosure: Coverage of the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference is sponsored by Intel. All content is controlled by SiliconANGLE, and neither Intel nor Alibaba have editorial influence on the coverage.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE