XPeng Motors, one of the Chinese automobile companies looking to rival Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), has built China's largest self-driving computing center in Inner Mongolia.
Based on Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA)'s Cloud Intelligence computing platform, the Fuyao centre has a total computing power of 600 PFLOPS, increasing the training speed of XPeng's self-driving models by 170 times.
"As the demand for self-driving simulation training changes, we need a robust local and cloud-based computing power to provide support," XPeng chairman and chief executive He Xiaopeng told media.
"I am very confident that the partnership with Alibaba Cloud will allow us to accelerate the development of autonomous driving technology."
In order to train algorithms for autonomous driving systems, a large amount of data must be processed.
With the new computing center, Xpeng claims that its core autonomous driving model will be trained within an hour instead of seven days.
XPeng uses Fuyao to train the algorithm model for its City NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot), adding that traffic conditions on urban roads are more complex than highways.
As its core ecommerce business slows, Alibaba, an investor in Xpeng, has been trying to strengthen its cloud computing division, with the move highlighting the firm's desire to get into the fast-growing electric vehicle space.
According to the company, Fuyao benefits from Alibaba Cloud's lower computing costs.
Xpeng sees autonomous driving features as a way to compete against giants Tesla and Warren Buffet-backed BYD in the fiercely competitive EV market in China, which has other EV startups like Nio and Xpeng.