Tencent and Baidu Moving Forward With Technology Advancement

Tencent has been seen to invest around US$70 billion to advance whilst Baidu starts the planet’s biggest vehicle ground to test cars that can drive by themselves. Considering Tencent’s strong infrastructure project, this will have a fresh nationwide network consisting of large and high-quality data centers. There will be many servers put in every area, i.e. a million. Baidu’s exciting self-driving initiative, namely Apollo has experience with driving vehicles within 24 cities across the globe. It has done above 100,000 trips for people.

What is Tencent?

If you are new to technology news and have not heard about Tencent Holdings, this is a huge Chinese internet giant. It is based in Shenzhen. They have the world’s largest video games company and also China’s biggest social media platform.

What is Baidu?

Baidu is also Chinese and is a search engine giant along with an artificial intelligence champion.

Features of Tencent’s latest investment

Now that you know who these companies are, let us look at why they are becoming popular. Tencent states that it wishes to invest US$70 billion. This will be in the following five years and modern digital infrastructure. They will be looking mainly at cloud computing, AI or artificial intelligence, blockchain technology moreover the Internet of Things. They will also be looking at the infrastructure present to handle these such as 5G mobile networks, advanced servers, data centers, plus supercomputers.

Tencent decided to do this after they aimed to increase new capital to be used for overall corporate aims by giving medium-term notes. These will be till US$20 billion and to some professional investors and linked to its particular filing occurring with the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Tencent’s infrastructure project incorporates a modern nationwide network consisting of huge-scale data areas, having one million servers present in every area. The company claims to do this.

The above would be done after Tencent constructs its large data center present on a site that is 51-hectares and has above 30,000 square meters consisting of tunneled places within a large 100-meter-high hill, located in the southwest Guizhou province.

Tong Taosang who is the company’s senior executive vice-president stated in the newspaper Guangming Daily, that they aim to even enhance contact with certain internal scientific research professionals along with laboratory resources present at good universities. The purpose will be to find and use talent, handle scientific problems, and be involved in developing industry standards.

Impact of the investment

Tencent’s latest investment shows a powerful dedication coming from the country’s hi-tech organization to help with the economy after it got hit by Covid-19. This has resulted in many economies around the world suffering much.

The fresh infrastructure wishes to have a more vital influence during the current global economic crisis, the spoilt supply chains, and fragile domestic plus foreign demand. The level of new and modern digital infrastructure investment may become more as different businesses follow this plan like Tencent is doing and cleverly invest in top data centers, hi-tech initiatives, AI, as well as advanced communications.

Baidu’s Initiative

Baidu finished the construction of the globe’s biggest testing area present for independent driving along with the vehicle-to-infrastructure type of communication.

Being huge in area, the famous Apollo Park located within Beijing possesses above 200 cars that are independent driving ones. It has facilities that will handle the complete autonomous vehicle creation procedure like research, testing, etc. Baidu has claimed this.

Baidu states that they will get and keep data present from the everyday function of their cars. Occurring at Apollo, they will even look at remotely controlling cars through the cloud.

Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is another thing that Baidu states to be doing. They want to be looking at applications that can handle this. These technologies, which are even being looked at by Chinese tech companies like Huawei, will be able to connect vehicles remotely and that with different road traffic features like signal lights, speed control signals, etc.

Baidu and other companies are focusing on this because autonomous vehicles are popular on the plans of the US as well as China. However, the technology seems tough to figure out because driving and going through the real traffic and environment is tough by these autonomous cars.

It was in 2013 when Baidu began creating independent driving technologies. Within the last year, Baidu claims to have been increasing its self-driving wishes, stating that it wants to develop testing places plus pilot function areas present for autonomous cars. They want to do this in cities like Chongqing, Yangquan city located in Shanxi province, and Hefei city in Anhui province.

Despite this, they have a lot of competition in China. This is because many companies are involved in this field. AutoX which is another self-driving company in China, despite being a new company, set up an 80,000 sq ft major factory in Shanghai. They say it is the biggest data place present for vehicle data that is self-driving. It is the biggest robotaxi function center located in Asia as well.

Another competitor, i.e. Pony.ai, is in Guangzhou said that it has succeeded in a partnership with Toyota which is a popular Japanese car company. The partnership aims to pursue research and the creation of next-generation mobility features.

Technology’s impact on China’s rice

China has the planet’s biggest producer of rice. It is eaten much over here as well. Change is expected in the way it will be grown.

XAG, i.e. an agricultural drone maker has put its advanced drone-based direct seeding system known as JetSeed from its testing phase to commercial use. This is on many fields in China. It will handle the shortage of labor present due to Covid-19 and make the process of rice growing to be more efficient.

It can be seen that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced China’s technology sector to think of innovative ways to help its population and country out. This example needs to be followed in other countries as well.

Originally published at https://audiovisualaoce.com on June 12, 2020.