The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) announced today that Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), the leading Chinese language Internet search provider, has joined OCP as a Platinum member. OCP was initiated by Facebook in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond. Since then, OCP has been consistently innovating around open source contributions, including the areas of networking, servers, storage and Open Rack.
Under the strategy of “strengthening the mobile foundation and leading in AI”, Baidu has been steadily building an AI ecosystem, with accelerated productization and commercialization. As integral components to its overall AI ecosystem, Baidu has developed two open platforms - the Apollo open autonomous driving platform and the conversational AI system DuerOS. Baidu Cloud has adopted a three-in-one development strategy of “ABC” (AI, big data, and cloud computing), providing fundamental technologies such as AI and IoT to digitize the physical world through empowering partners and building a collaborative ecosystem.
Zhenyu Hou, Baidu Vice President, said: “Baidu is pleased to join the OCP to collaborate on development and applications of latest technologies. When the development of AI has been seeing strong momentum globally and international technology leaders are exploring various possibilities of AI technologies, Baidu will contribute our technological strengths and build a robust open AI hardware ecosystem with the OCP partners.”
As one of the largest hyper-scale data center operators globally, Baidu has state-of-the-art data center, networking, and server technologies, and provides such capabilities to our customs through Baidu Cloud. As the foundation of Baidu AI infrastructure, Baidu AI computing platform X-MAN is designed with pioneering concepts such as hardware disaggregation, resource pooling, liquid cooling, hardware modularization and flexible topologies with unified architecture. Since the first release in 2016, Baidu has successfully launched 3 generations of X-MAN and deployed it in a large scale to accelerate Baidu AI strategy.
Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer for the Open Compute Project Foundation, said, “Baidu is a globally recognized leader in innovation and has a track record of developing efficient and scalable server and rack architectures. We are very pleased to have Baidu join OCP and share their best practices, expertise and innovation with the worldwide Community.”