One of the cloud computing providers that is no stranger to the country is Alibaba Cloud, which also offers a variety of their services to businesses and enterprises in Malaysia. Last week during the Alibaba Cloud AI Tech Day event, they announced several updates in their initiatives for the country, in terms of partnerships, new service offerings and also the announcement of hackathons.
In terms of collaboration, they announced new collaborations with YTL AI Labs, PNB and HiSeven. With YTL AI Labs, they are developing Ilmu 0.1, which is Multitask Language Understanding using the Malay language. In fact, since September 2024, YTL AI Labs has been developing their AI technology based on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, and will enable more AI applications to be developed in the future.
PNB, which is Permodalan Nasional Berhad, has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Alibaba Cloud to use their AI technology to improve operational efficiency, decision-making, and support services. HiSEVEN is a digital marketing company that will use Alibaba Cloud's cloud computing technology for their AI-based marketing products.
For local developers, their 9th generation ECS (Elastic Compute Services) service will be launched and will be accepted by local users as early as mid-2025. This ECS service will increase performance by 20%. The latest Qwen 2.5 Language Model (LLM) is also now available with a parameter size of 72 Billion and the visual version, Qwen 2.5-VL, is also available in Model-Bahasa-Visual. which can be accessed via Qwen Chat.
And finally, Alibaba Cloud in collaboration with Agmo Studios also announced their hackathon event which is currently open for registration until 30 April 2025, and the culminating event will be held around mid-May. This event offers RM 10,000 cash for first place, along with 3000 USD Alibaba Cloud credit and other souvenirs.