Alibaba Cloud has discovered the AI "traffic password"

When the Olympic flame ignited on the Seine River, Alibaba Cloud rode the wave of the Paris Olympics and made a splash.

Recently, many Olympic fans have lined up at the three major world landmark venues in Paris - the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde, and Les Invalides. Many internet celebrities, Olympic champions, and former NBA stars have also come to visit.

Surrounded by celebrities is the "Paris Olympic Smart Image Moment Experience" installation prepared by Alibaba Cloud: with just a few photos captured, AI can automatically capture and restore the characters, generate exclusive venue videos, allowing participants to transform into beach volleyball players or archery masters on the spot.

These AI-generated videos have been quickly shared by internet celebrities and Olympic fans on social apps like TikTok and Instagram. Alibaba Cloud's offline experience points have also turned into Olympic "grassroots" check-in points.

Alibaba Cloud seems to have cracked the "traffic code" with "AI black technology". By breaking through in creativity and entertainment, simple and easy-to-use creation, social interaction, and global reach, it has successfully sparked discussions on social platforms.

Alibaba Cloud's ability to achieve such realistic video effects is thanks to its latest Animate Anyone algorithm. This algorithm accurately captures and reconstructs user images from multiple perspectives, transforming static photos into three-dimensional dynamic videos through deep learning, showcasing every movement and facial expression change. This also brings new creative space to the global social entertainment market.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of Alibaba Cloud's "participation" in the Olympics this time.

At the B-end application level, Alibaba Cloud has integrated old photo restoration and 360 live streaming effects into Olympic broadcasts, and even two-thirds of the live signals at this Olympics are handled by Alibaba Cloud's cloud network.

The Olympic Broadcasting Services company introduced that the "time-space freeze-frame" scenes of the Paris Olympics, similar to science fiction movies, used to take Hollywood studios several days to edit, but Alibaba Cloud can synthesize and produce them in just a few seconds, directly applying them to live signals.

Riding on the Olympics, Alibaba Cloud has quietly become the fastest player to reap the benefits of the AI trend.

Data from market research firm Mordor Intelligence shows that the market size of AI + sports is approximately $6 billion this year; by 2029, this number is expected to grow to $21 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of about 28.69%. Alibaba has also been the first to benefit from this wave of AI sports.

For Alibaba Cloud, supporting sports event broadcasts and breaking through public communication barriers is the beginning of AI's imagination being applied to reality.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) a month ago, Alibaba Cloud founder Wang Jian mentioned that the ultimate goal of AI is to serve the public and integrate into daily life, and the great opportunity for AI Cloud is to serve the public.

Therefore, finding channels and outlets to embed AI into the public's view has become a major task for Alibaba Cloud. With Alibaba Cloud's AI team holding the key to a thousand questions, the Olympics have personally set an example for small AI startups, demonstrating the huge potential of AI, which is the landing opportunity they have been searching for And this is exactly Alibaba Cloud's "solar strategy". Not only does it help AI land and "explore", but it has also previously invested in the star product "KIMI" on the dark side of the moon, and provided technical and cloud support for the startup project "Miaoya" under its major entertainment sector.

These AI startups build their AI applications through the Alibaba Cloud platform, and Alibaba Cloud is also able to consolidate its position as the leader in the cloud market. This is the "future granary" of the entire Alibaba Group, as well as the foundation for standing in the second half of the Internet era.

Since November last year, Alibaba Group has undergone a major strategic adjustment. The strategic focus has shifted to two core businesses - e-commerce and cloud.

"The last round of innovation in China's Internet industry almost all originated on the public cloud, and the next round of AI industry innovation will be the same. Alibaba Cloud wants to seize this opportunity." said Liu Weiguang, President of Alibaba Cloud's Public Cloud Business Unit.

Alibaba Cloud, which started with the public cloud in 2009, has been the leader in the cloud computing field for the past 15 years. However, under the encirclement of friendly competitors, Alibaba Cloud's market share dropped from nearly half to 27.1% last year.

Under pressure, Alibaba Cloud urgently needs to widen the gap with its competitors. Eddie Wu, the number one, made a bold statement at the May financial report meeting, stating that Alibaba Cloud aims to resume double-digit revenue growth in the second half of the 2025 fiscal year (October 2024 to March 2025); in the fourth quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, AI-related revenue is expected to achieve triple-digit growth.

Clearly, this replication of the TikTok "traffic password" to make itself stand out is also to implement Eddie Wu's growth plan. Perhaps by arousing the enthusiasm of the C-end market on a large scale, Alibaba Cloud's years of dedicated layout can also fully unleash its potential, truly becoming a giant in the AI cloud era and once again leading the Internet track