A truck equipped with Baidu's autonomous technologies is on display at the ABC Summit held on Nov 30 in Beijing. (Photo by Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn)
Another industry that benefits from the cloud technology is autonomous cars.
The company rolled out two core technologies to fuel not only global leading autonomous pioneers, such as BMW and Audi, but also support domestic latecomers during the development process.
Gu Weihao, general manager of Baidu Intelligent Vehicle, known as the L3 Division of the internet company, said that the first technology is a focus on a branch of AI called deep learning, which is able to give vehicles optimal image sensing and recognition. The other is Baidu's high-precision maps.
Baidu is not the only company in China expanding efforts on cloud technology.
Aliyun, the cloud service arm of the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, recently said it would launch four new data centers across the world, which has been read as a move to compete against Amazon and Microsoft.
The data centers will be located in Dubai, Tokyo, Sydney and Germany, and it brings the number of Aliyun data centers outside China up to eight.
American technology and market research company Forrester predicts that the global public cloud market will be $146 billion in 2017, up from $87 billion in 2015.
"Seventy-seven percent of Chinese enterprise infrastructure decision-makers said that using a public cloud platform is a high or critical priority over the next 12 months, versus 58 percent of their global peers," the company said.
Forrester believes that the public cloud market in China will increase from $1.8 billion in 2015 to $3.8 billion by 2020.
