"History's longest Double Eleven," e-commerce used more computing power

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Liu Baodan

As the "longest Double Eleven in history" comes to an end, the cloud service providers behind major e-commerce platforms can finally take a breather.

Since the inception of the e-commerce industry, it has been closely linked with cloud computing. This year is recognized as the year of AI applications, and the trend of e-commerce AI is becoming evident. Coupled with the extended promotional period, new demands have been placed on cloud service providers.

Yang Zheming, head of Tencent Cloud's e-commerce industry solutions, told Wall Street Insight that Tencent Cloud supports most of the domestic e-commerce platforms. From what he has observed, the computing power consumption of e-commerce platforms during this year's Double Eleven is slightly higher than last year.

He pointed out that many e-commerce platforms began their "Double Eleven" activities in the first week after returning from the National Day holiday. In terms of computing power growth, platforms started procuring computing resources in the cloud to prepare for the traffic peak as early as the first week after the holiday.

This year's strategy of extending the promotional period has spread the traffic peak, which originally concentrated in the days following the 11th, into different time segments. Cloud services need to support rapid elastic scaling while maintaining high stability and availability, all while controlling cost inputs.

Yang Zheming stated: "Our current database, container services, and big data elastic EMR services all support rapid elastic scaling capabilities, allowing customers to quickly provision the resources they need within minutes and then rapidly scale down after the traffic peak to save costs."

In addition to the basic demands for cloud service stability, elastic scaling, and cost control, leading e-commerce platforms are also actively promoting e-commerce AI, which has been clearly reflected during Double Eleven.

Yang Zheming mentioned that during the traffic explosion period, e-commerce has a recommendation logic. In the past, recommendation systems were based on manual labeling or vector search and matching. This year, many customers are trying to use large models for recommendations, resulting in improved accuracy and richness of recommendations on e-commerce platforms compared to before.

Of course, intelligent recommendations are just one part; cloud providers are attempting to deeply integrate more AI technologies into e-commerce solutions, such as providing intelligent customer service and smart marketing functions.

It is reported that to meet the diverse AI needs of e-commerce platforms, Tencent Cloud offers AI solutions for e-commerce industry clients, including digital humans, AI image generation, AI marketing copy generation, intelligent customer service, and AI translation.

Yang Zheming revealed that digital humans and the Hunyuan large model are popular products among e-commerce clients.

As a Tencent Cloud client, Zhiwen Technology utilizes Tencent's Hunyuan large model to understand multimodal data such as voice, video, and images.

The trend of e-commerce AI will undoubtedly bring new incremental space for cloud service providers, but everything is still in its infancy, and there is a long way to go