Apsara Conference
Alibaba Cloud's annual technology conference in Hangzhou, where the company announces its AI models, chips and infrastructure plans.
The Apsara Conference is Alibaba Cloud’s yearly event, held in Hangzhou, and it is where the company sets out what it intends to build next. Think of it as Alibaba’s equivalent of the big developer conferences run by Google and Apple, with the difference that the announcements lean heavily toward cloud infrastructure, chips and the Qwen model family rather than consumer products.
It is worth knowing the name because a lot of China’s AI roadmap news arrives on this one day each year, which makes it useful for tracking and also worth treating carefully. Conference keynotes are where plans get announced, and a plan is not a product.