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Recently, Ant Group's own park in Beijing, Ant T Space, was officially opened, and Ant Group's innovative technology headquarters was officially established in Beijing. On August 14, a Beijing Youth Daily reporter visited the park, which is located near Weigongcun in Haidian District and close to many universities. Currently, there are about 3,000 employees working here, and the technical R&D team has more than 2,000 people. Ant Group Chairman and CEO Jing Xiandong said at the opening ceremony of T Space, "Ant will take advantage of Beijing's talent and scientific and technological innovation highland, increase investment, and open a new chapter for Ant Technology."

It is understood that the headquarters covers Ant's cutting-edge technological exploration and practice in the fields of Ant artificial intelligence and data elements, and consists of four major business entities: Ant Technology Research Institute, OceanBase Domestic Database Headquarters, Digital Ant Power Headquarters, and Ant Digital Technology North Headquarters. On the day of the visit, the five presidents in charge of Ant Group's technology business were all present, which is enough to show the importance Ant Group attaches to Beijing.

Ant Group stated that Beijing has always been an important innovation and research and development center of Ant Group. As early as 2010, Alipay (China) established a Beijing branch. In 2020, the domestic distributed database OceanBase commercialization company also settled in Beijing.

According to a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily, Ant had previously been renting properties in the CBD of Chaoyang District for offices. Last year, Ant Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Haidian District Government of Beijing and announced the establishment of an innovative technology headquarters in Haidian District. This year, the renovation of the park was completed and Ant Group successfully moved to its own park.

Why is it named "T Space"? Ant Group's Chief Technology Officer He Zhengyu said, "T stands for both technology and talent. The naming of Ant T Space reflects Ant's technology and talent layout in Beijing. The relocation of Ant Group's Beijing headquarters from CBD to Zhongguancun also reflects Ant Group's determination to move forward in science and technology. He said that in the next ten years, Ant will continue to increase its investment in science and technology, and its science and technology strategy will focus on two major areas: artificial intelligence and data elements.

Ant Group said that Beijing has abundant talent resources and a large number of universities and research institutes, which is an important factor in attracting Ant to set up business in Beijing. As of the end of June this year, Ant Group had more than 3,000 employees in Beijing, including more than 2,000 technical R&D teams, of which nearly 80% were technical talents and nearly 60% had a master's degree or above.

At the same time, Ant Group also has close cooperation with Beijing universities and scientific research institutions. It has established two joint laboratories with Tsinghua University, and has carried out project cooperation with 10 universities in Beijing, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. The AI ​​visual results jointly tackled by Ant and Tsinghua University won the first prize of Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Natural Science Award; Ant and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications tackled graph intelligence technology and won the first prize of the China Electronics Society Science and Technology Progress Award; Ant and Renmin University of China cooperated on the "Blockchain Legal Teaching and Curriculum System Reform" collaborative education project, which won the second prize of the 2022 National Teaching Achievement Award.

Talking about the role of Beijing in the development of Ant Group, Ant Group said that the Beijing Innovation and Technology Headquarters is the place for commercial exploration and practice of the two major technology strategies, and also provides core technical support for them. The four major business entities settled in the Beijing Innovation and Technology Headquarters are also the carriers of Ant's commercial practice and technical exploration in these two major technology strategies.

First of all, OceanBase is a domestic distributed database that is 100% "self-developed" by Ant Group, and it carries the start of Ant's technological innovation. Since its birth in 2010, OceanBase has supported "Double 11" for more than ten years, and is the only database in the world that has broken the "Database World Cup" TPC-C and TPC-H test records. Since its official commercialization and independent operation in Beijing in 2020, OceanBase has helped more than 1,000 customers in multiple industries such as finance, government affairs, operators, retail, and the Internet to upgrade key business systems, and maintains the top share of the financial market among independent distributed database vendors.

Secondly, Ant Digits is the representative of Ant Group's technology commercialization and systematic practice. With the productization of blockchain, privacy computing, security technology and other technologies, it will effectively promote the digitalization of the industry. At present, Ant Digits has served more than 10,000 companies, and the results of technology commercialization have begun to take shape. As the headquarters of Ant Digits in northern China, Beijing is also an important base for the research and development of cutting-edge technologies such as Ant Digits' cloud services and security technology.

It is worth noting that the headquarters of Ant Group's AI commercialization company "Digital Ant" which was just established this year is also rooted in Beijing. Specifically, Digital Ant provides three types of services for enterprises' intelligent operation: first, it provides intelligent customer service and marketing services, and provides customers with "AI cloud customer service" and intelligent marketing, intelligent training quality inspection and other services through the customer service field big model, helping enterprises to reduce operating costs and improve operating efficiency; second, it provides intelligent operation services, providing enterprises with intelligent service solutions including legal and compliance aspects; third, it provides intelligent technology services, through the CodeFuse code big model, helping enterprises to achieve intelligent R&D, lower the threshold of technology R&D, and improve the availability of technology.

Finally, the Ant Technology Research Institute established in Beijing is committed to exploring cutting-edge technologies. It has identified two frontier directions: "breaking through the core technologies of data elements" and "exploring new boundaries of artificial intelligence". It will tackle related technologies including editable real-time generative artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence and intelligent robots, data storage, high-performance real-time graph computing technology, and dense computing, to reserve future strength for Ant's technological innovation.

He Zhengyu said that in the future, the first thing is to serve the industry. Only when technology is truly integrated with the industry can it release its greatest value; the second is to go overseas. Only competition can improve product efficiency and truly bring into play the strength of science and technology; the third is to face the future and face more cutting-edge technological development. Part of the driving force behind the technology accumulated by Ant comes from the confidence in the future, so we must support more and better ideas about the future.

Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Wen Jing

Editor/Fan Hongwei