Chinese scientist behind supercomputer in orbit: ‘Put AI in space’

“It’s a good time to think about how we can put AI into space, not just in your laptop or cellphone,” said Wang, director of Zhejiang Lab and founder of Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit

, during a keynote speech at the Beyond Expo tech conference in Macau on Wednesday.

“Space has, again, become the frontier for us to think about what we can do in the next 10, 20 or 50 years,” he said, adding that “we don’t want AI missing in space”.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

First unveiled in November at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in east Zhejiang province, the Three-Body project aims to establish infrastructure in space to enhance computing efficiency compared to Earth-based data processing. The ultimate goal is to achieve a total computing power of 1,000 petaflops – equivalent to a quintillion calculations per second.