Through Xi’an Future AI Computing Center, we can see the different future of AI

From AI industrialization to industrial AI, AI is not only considered as the key force to promote a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, but also as the technological base for future innovation.
As early as 2017, the release of the New Generation AI Development Plan pointed out the direction of how to build the first-mover advantage of China’s AI development; In 2020, AI will become one of the seven major areas of new infrastructure, and the infrastructure construction of big data center will be put on the agenda; In 2021, in the “Fourteenth Five-Year Plan”, artificial intelligence is not only the frontier of scientific and technological research, but also one of the key industries of the digital economy.
The introduction of a series of policies has accelerated the innovation of AI technology and its integration with the real economy. Under this trend, all parts of China are accelerating the layout of the AI industry, and the computing infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers has become the entry point for many cities. On the one hand, computing power has become the core productive force for the development of the digital economy, and on the other hand, intelligent computing centers are also the basic support for building the future intelligent world.
In September this year, Xi’an Future AI Computing Center was officially put into operation, opening a new chapter in Xi’an AI industry. As the first large-scale AI computing power cluster in the northwest, the formal online operation of Xi’an future AI computing center can not only promote the cooperation between industry, university and research, strengthen the AI industrial cluster, and accelerate AI innovation; It will also further promote the development of the “6+5+6+1” modern industrial system in Xi’an on the basis of deepening the “double chain integration” of the artificial intelligence industrial chain and innovation chain.
The next stop of AI is computing power
According to the Development Plan for the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence, it is expected that by 2025, China’s basic theory of artificial intelligence will achieve a major breakthrough, some technologies and applications will reach the world’s leading level, artificial intelligence will become the main driving force for China’s industrial upgrading and economic transformation, and the construction of intelligent society will make positive progress.
In order to achieve this goal, the “Fourteenth Five-Year Plan” outlines the “new generation of artificial intelligence” as the focus of the topic, and with the promotion of new infrastructure, digital economy and other favorable policies, China’s artificial intelligence market has developed steadily and presented a new development trend.
At the level of industrial scale, policy support and capital market assistance are injecting new momentum into the development of AI industry. According to the 2021 V2 Global AI Expenditure Guide released by IDC, about 8% of AI-related expenditures in the world will come from the Chinese market in 2025, with the market size ranking third among the nine regions in the world.
At the level of technological innovation, AI has constantly made new breakthroughs through the integration of new technologies such as cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things. For example, in terms of algorithms, models represented by deep learning and neural networks are emerging in an all-round way; In terms of computing power, the demand of AI algorithm for computing power has far exceeded the evolution speed of Moore’s Law, and computing power has become the decisive factor for breakthroughs in AI applications in the future.
At the industry application level, the application of AI technology is accelerating the digital transformation and intelligent upgrading of the industry. More and more industries, including finance, manufacturing, medical treatment, transportation and so on, have begun to try to apply AI technology in multiple business areas. The business value of AI to enterprises, such as cost reduction and efficiency increase, customer experience improvement, is gradually emerging.
Today, with the vigorous development of AI industry, computing power is becoming the “bucket short board” of AI. According to a study released by OpenAI, the computing power used in AI training doubled every three to four months. Since 2012, the requirements of AI on computing power have increased by 300000 times, which greatly exceeds the speed of improvement of existing computing power.
This is also the reason why various places, including Xi’an, have increased the layout of intelligent computing centers. For Xi’an, the future construction of AI computing centers can provide computing power services, data services and algorithm services required for AI applications, thus promoting the construction of intelligent production and the aggregation of intelligent industries, and laying the foundation for promoting the intelligent transformation of traditional industries and the development of digital economy.
Accelerate the layout of AI industry, and strive to reach the top in Xi’an
In the national AI industry map, Xi’an has many congenital advantages. Geographically, as the starting point of the ancient Silk Road and an important node city of the “the Belt and Road”, Xi’an is the “bridgehead” for the innovative development of the entire northwest region; In terms of industrial layout, Xi’an has a good soil for the development of artificial intelligence industry by virtue of its intensive scientific and educational resources, as well as its strong electronic industry foundation and broad local application market.
Thanks to this, in March 2020, Xi’an was officially approved to build the “National New Generation AI Innovation and Development Pilot Zone”. Taking this opportunity, Xi’an began to vigorously promote basic theoretical research, key technology research, application scenario construction, and professional talent training, giving full play to the platform aggregation effect of the pilot zone, and promoting the deep integration of AI and economic and social development.
In November 2020, the Action Plan for Xi’an to Build a National New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Pilot Zone (2020-2022) proposed that by 2022, the overall development level of artificial intelligence will be leading in the country, the basic frontier theoretical research will achieve landmark achievements, the core technology breakthrough will be achieved, the innovation system will be initially established, the industrial ecosystem will be basically formed, the application demonstration effect will be initially apparent, and the industrial development will take shape.
In addition, in order to further accelerate the construction of Qinchuang’s original new drive platform, promote the deep integration of the industrial chain and the innovation chain, and smooth the transformation of scientific and technological achievements and the channels of enterprise technological innovation, Shaanxi Province has issued the Three-Year Action Plan for the Construction of Qinchuang’s Original New Drive Platform (2021-2023), which supports the fields including the new generation of information technology, artificial intelligence, from the basic frontier, major key common technologies to application demonstration.
Driven by a series of policies, Xi’an AI industry is rising rapidly. At present, there are more than 150 AI enterprises in Xi’an, with 11 national R&D platforms and 36 provincial and ministerial platforms, and 26 world-leading national scientific research achievements in machine learning, graphics recognition, unmanned systems, intelligent robots and other fields.
On this basis, the implementation of Xi’an’s future AI computing center will provide one-stop AI services for thousands of businesses, and users will submit service applications to the operating company by applying or purchasing services. Thus, AI computing power will become urban public resources like water and electricity, helping enterprises and scientific research institutions reduce costs and improve efficiency.
However, the future AI computing center is not only a computing power cluster platform. Xi’an is building a comprehensive architecture of “1 center and 4 platforms” around the center, where 1 center refers to the AI computing center, and 4 platforms refer to the public computing service platform, application innovation incubation platform, industrial aggregation development platform, and scientific research innovation and talent training platform. Through the whole industrial chain capability of “one center and four platforms”, Xi’an will realize the connection of politics, industry, education, research and application, and further enable the development of artificial energy and intelligence industry.
The future AI computing center will help accelerate the AI industry
Up to now, the future AI computing center has completed the research work of 214 university enterprises and scientific research institutions in Xi’an, and the research power demand exceeds 500P, involving scientific research, manufacturing, automatic driving, education, medical treatment, transportation, electricity and other industries. In addition, the future AI computing center will also carry out cooperation and exchanges with more than 40 enterprises and actively promote ecological adaptation.
Relying on the future AI computing center, Shaanxi Normal University and Huawei have jointly built the “MindSpot Research Room” to jointly carry out the construction of open source data sets, deep neural network algorithms, cultural and educational characteristics related scenes, ecological communities, etc. based on the basic software and hardware platform of Ascension AI. It is understood that the “MindSpot Research Room” is one of the important cooperation projects of the future AI computing center. In the future, more partners will join to build a prosperous and healthy AI ecosystem and accelerate the realization of the driving and supporting role of AI in economic and social development.
Now, Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology is building a large model of domestic radar remote sensing through cooperation with Huawei, based on MindSpot and Ascension hardware, through depth map optimization such as map and calculation integration and cross-layer memory reuse technology; We will combine the specific application development needs of remote sensing with Huawei’s full-stack AI basic software and hardware platform to promote the rapid development of remote sensing applications and enable remote sensing scientific research and industrial applications.
In order to better collect and research multi-dimensional data, Northwest University of Technology, in the process of building the air-space, air-space and sea-integrated big data application technology laboratory, also promoted the voice pre-training big model project under the Ascent Atlas computing base and the AI framework MindSpot, so as to fill the gap in the field of large-scale Chinese voice pre-training model, and provide intelligent voice interaction, voice language diversity protection Provide technical support for international multilingual expansion.
From aggregating computing resources to aggregating industrial ecology, to stimulating the intelligent upgrading of traditional industries, the future AI computing center is becoming an important cornerstone of the future AI industry development in Xi’an. Now, the future AI computing center is giving full play to its own resource advantages and scientific and technological value, and applying the solution based on the Ascension AI computing base to multiple popular AI application scenarios such as automatic driving, smart medical, smart city, smart transportation, smart mine, etc., so as to promote the integration of AI and traditional industry development, and realize the landing of the national new generation AI innovation and development strategy.