Baidu Cloud Announces Hybrid Cloud Platform To Accelerate Enterprise Deployment of AI

BEIJING, Sept. 20, 2017 -- Baidu Cloud, the cloud arm of Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU), announced today it has released the ABC – STACK, a hybrid cloud platform, that provides enterprise customers with powerful and flexible solutions to effectively integrate and deploy AI into their businesses. These solutions range from ready-to-use software to customized AI model development and training.

An all-in-one ABC server developed by Baidu is on display at the Baidu Cloud Summit in Beijing on September 15. The ABC server is for the on premise deployment of ABC-STACK. Each server contains 64 GPUs and one cluster supports parallel deployment of 1,000 servers.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9ace974d-5b96-4535-a882-691380b16c72

Since its inception, Baidu Cloud has adopted an integrated approach that combines capabilities and resources in AI, Big Data and Cloud Computing, providing customers with not only storage and computing but also complete solutions and services that are ready to deploy. Baidu Cloud’s unique offerings have received recognition from many industries. In only one year since its launch, Baidu Cloud’s customer base has increased 10 times year-over-year, traffic increased eight times and revenue increased four times.

The ABC – STACK encompasses three areas of cloud computing:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):

• To meet the enterprise and developers’ needs in the AI ​​era for parallel and heterogeneous computing, ABC – STACK offers complete commercial processors such as FPGA, GPU and Intel Xeon Phi to enable customers to develop leading edge AI and large data analytics. Altogether, these high performance networking and storage solutions form a distributed, scalable AI infrastructure.
• In addition, Baidu Cloud also released XPU, an FPGA-based AI processor, which Baidu designed using a next-generation AI processing architecture. XPU has dedicated computing units and hundreds of processors that achieves the versatility of the GPU and the efficiency of the FPGA.
• For the on premise deployment of ABC-STACK, Baidu Cloud introduced an all-in-one ABC machine with 64 GPUs in one server, and one cluster supports parallel deployment of 1,000 servers.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS):

• ABC – STACK supports major AI frameworks like PaddlePaddle and end-to-end Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS).

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

• ABC – STACK is the gateway to more than 60 AI capabilities developed by Baidu, which are available as a set of open APIs and SaaS products in the Baidu Cloud.
• These capabilities include video content analysis (VCA), image recognition, facial recognition, speech recognition and more. For example, a streaming site could use Baidu’s VCA technology to let AI automatically select the most optimal frame as the cover for its videos.
• For customers who want to deploy a Baidu trained AI model, it can be provided in two ways -- through an application solution developed by Baidu Cloud or an open API.

“The ABC – STACK is the embodiment of Baidu’s ABC strategy integrating our AI, Big Data and Cloud Computing capabilities,” said Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Baidu. “Cloud computing has entered the 2.0 era, and we are providing enterprises with competitive capabilities to leverage big data and AI analytics.”

“In addition to helping customers reduce cost and boost efficiency, which you can achieve with traditional cloud offerings, the ABC intelligent cloud makes a more profound impact by creating new business models,” said Zhang.

Some of Baidu Cloud’s early partners have already demonstrated how ABC – STACK has the potential to transform their businesses. Shougang Automation and Information Company Ltd, a subsidiary of steel giant Shougang Group, used an ABC – STACK enabled AI solution to automatically review and identify inferior steel products with a 99.98 percent accuracy.

“The accuracy rate of the detection solution for our steel products greatly exceeded our expectations. It strengthens our determination to deepen the partnership with Baidu Cloud to unlock the full potential of AI for our manufacturing operations,” said She Guoping, general manager of Shougang Automation and Information Company Ltd.

In collaboration with Shanghai Electric, a power generation and electrical equipment manufacturing company in China, Baidu Cloud also developed a failure prediction model for its wind turbines with more than 85 percent accuracy.

Wasu Group, one of China’s biggest media companies with 30 million cable TV subscribers, developed voice enabled TV set top boxes and a video content recommendation system using Baidu Cloud based capabilities. 

Baidu also announced a partnership with UnionPay, the largest card payment organization in the world based on payment transactions, schemes and number of cards issued, to jointly build China’s first financial service centric cloud platform in the city of Wuhan, China, supporting leading edge AI enabled business models such as using facial recognition at point of purchase.

About Baidu

Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider. Baidu aims to make a complex world simpler through technology. Baidu's ADSs trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol "BIDU". Currently, ten ADSs represent one Class A ordinary share.

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