SenseTime’s Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) Commences Operation

Jan 24, 2022 - Shanghai - SenseTime today announced that its next-generation Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) located in the Lingang New Area, Shanghai, has commenced operation. With a designed computing capacity of 3.74 exaFLOPS[1], this open, large-scale and energy-efficient advanced computing infrastructure is expected to become one of Asia’s largest AIDCs. It will significantly boost the capabilities of SenseTime’s proprietary SenseCore AI infrastructure, a universal AI innovation platform to accelerate AI industrialization in different sectors and create a vibrant AI ecosystem.

SenseTime's next-generation AIDC located in the Lingang New Area of Shanghai

The expansion of AI supercomputing infrastructure has been one of SenseTime’s long-term strategies to support the mass production of AI models. After breaking ground in July 2020, the newly launched AIDC will bring SenseTime’s total computing capacity to over 4.91 exaFLOPS. Together with SenseTime’s 23 AI supercomputing clusters strategically located across major geographic markets, the Lingang AIDC will advance the company’s innovation and enhance its competitiveness to empower digital transformation for various industries and facilitate the development of Smart Business, Smart City, Smart Life and Smart Auto.

Dr. Xu Li, co-founder and CEO of SenseTime at the opening ceremony of AIDC

“The launch of SenseTime’s AIDC is a major milestone in our continuous endeavor to build a universal infrastructure for AI innovation. It provides the critical foundations and resources for us to drive digitalization and sustainable development in all walks of life with universal AI capabilities. Working towards our goal of developing a world-class AIDC, we will further open up SenseCore’s capabilities to both academia and industries to drive future AI productivity and foster a healthy, prosperous and inclusive AI ecosystem,” said Dr. Xu Li, co-founder and CEO of SenseTime at the opening ceremony.

Enhance SenseCore’s capabilities to drive up future AI productivity

The SenseCore AI Infrastructure integrates the three layers of models, deep learning platforms and computing infrastructure, to accelerate industry-level AI model deployment and commercialization. As an integral part of the computing infrastructure layer, the AIDC will enhance SenseCore’s key capabilities as a versatile AI-as-a-Service offering, providing customers with computation resources and large-scale data management for training AI models at a low cost.

The AIDC provides powerful, elastic and stable computing capacity which allows the training of base models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Through organic integration of computing resources, the AIDC achieves mass production of a diverse and growing portfolio of AI models with rich functionality and superior accuracy, significantly improving SenseTime’s R&D efficiency and reducing the marginal costs for production.

Meanwhile, the AIDC’s architecture also features security as one of its top priorities. Rigorous data privacy and securities measures have been enforced at multiple levels, including a comprehensive set of guidelines for data categorization by security levels, sophisticated access control system, strong encryption and appropriate isolation of computing resources for different authorized groups. SenseTime has also been certified with the internationally recognized ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 29151 certifications, a testament to its high standards in information security management and protection of personal identifiable information.

Boost AI-as-a-Service for a sustainable AI ecosystem

Driven by the significantly enhanced computing capacity, the AIDC infrastructure will further support SenseTime to empower its Smart Business, Smart City, Smart Life and Smart Auto sectors with proprietary, innovative AI products and services, as well as strengthening its R&D in cutting-edge technologies. With cloud-based full-stack AI model production and deployment services, SenseTime’s partners are able to produce AI models tailored to their needs with limited effort, expertise and investment required.

Following the opening ceremony, the 2nd Conference of Artificial Intelligence Computing Power Industry Ecological Alliance (ICPA) co-founded by SenseTime and its partners from industry and academia was held to discuss topics such as the supply and demand of computing power, challenges in the industry as well as strategies, showcasing the AIDC’s key role in facilitating communication and cooperation in the AI industry.

In line with SenseTime’s AI-enabled carbon neutrality initiatives, the AIDC is also a green facility which implements energy-saving power consumption systems. With this, the AIDC is expected to reduce line loss rate by approximately 50% and save approximately 45 million kWh of its annual power consumption. In the long run, more environmental practices will be introduced at the AIDC to boost its green and sustainable development.

Facing a new wave of technological evolution, the new-generation AI infrastructure will bring profound and multidimensional impact to the AI industry. Moving forward, SenseTime will further expand the computing capacity of the AIDC and develop more supercomputing clusters across different regions so as to support the digital transformation of local economies and industries, ultimately contributing to a sustainable global AI ecosystem.

[1] one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second