60 years ago, the words of John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence, were actually fulfilled on the development of cloud computing in China!
In 1961, at the centennial ceremony of MIT, the famous father of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, proposed the concept of Utility Computing. He predicted that in the future, computers would become a public resource, shared as we commonly see water, electricity, and gas. John McCarthy probably didn't expect that his prediction would become a reality in China, on the other side of the globe, more than 60 years later.
It doesn't seem new to think about it now, but it was 1961, a full 20 years before the first personal computer was born. At the time, the idea was a wild idea. In fact, we now have a more accurate and appropriate description of the concept of utility computing, which is cloud computing. Americans were the first to put forward the concept of cloud computing, and cloud computing in the United States started very early, such as the CIA, the National Security Agency, NASA, etc., are using Amazon's AWS cloud computing services.
Although the United States started early in cloud computing, it is China that really makes cloud computing serve thousands of people. In 2018, the mainland proposed the concept of "new infrastructure" at the Central Economic Work Conference, which coincided with John McCarthy's ideas. New infrastructure refers to the construction of 5G, data centers, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, industrial Internet and other fields. Today, cloud computing in China is gradually becoming a daily demand like water, electricity, gas, etc., as John McCarthy said.
For example, since 2015, 12306 has cooperated with Alibaba Cloud to put 75% of the remaining ticket query business on the cloud. As we all know, the Spring Festival is the most spectacular population migration in the world, and in the time of about 40 days, behind it is a huge data torrent, especially in the two functions of residual ticket query and real-time data update, Alibaba Cloud alleviates the pressure of 12306, avoids server downtime, and serves hundreds of millions of people every year.
And in more invisible areas, cloud services are also closely related to our lives. For example, the State Grid and the Southern Power Grid use Alibaba cloud computing to predict peak electricity consumption and reasonably arrange power generation. In the financial field, many banks and financial institutions, including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, etc., are also using Alibaba Cloud. At present, Alibaba Cloud has planned to build five super data centers in China, located in Zhangbei, Heyuan, Hangzhou, Nantong and Wulanchabu, which radiate the three major economic belts of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. Relying on Alibaba cloud computing to build the city brain, medical insurance platform, etc., will also serve more and more people.
