Alibaba Unveils Intelligent Cockpits, Enterprise Partnerships and AI Glasses at WAIC 2025 - Middle East Business News and Information
'The innovations underscore Alibaba's growing role as a leader in applied generative AI, delivering intelligent solutions that are not only technologically advanced but deeply integrated into everyday experiences and industrial workflows,' said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Alibaba Launches Next-Generation AI Cockpit Experience:
Alibaba has unveiled its latest large multimodal model (LMM) solution powered by Qwen and specifically designed for automotive intelligent cockpits, developed in collaboration with global semiconductor leader Qualcomm and Banma, its intelligent cockpit solution provider. Built on Alibaba's Qwen models' visual understanding and multimodal capabilities, the system runs on Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8397 platform, delivering a more natural, intuitive, and proactive in-car AI experience.
At the heart of the system is Yan AI, Banma's intelligent assistant, which leverages Qwen's advanced language understanding, visual processing, and contextual reasoning to enable seamless human-vehicle interaction. Drivers can use natural voice commands to reserve restaurant tables, purchase movie tickets, request navigation, or find the fastest route. Beyond reactive responses, Yan AI anticipates user needs—suggesting adjustments to cabin temperature, recommending music playlists during long drives, making the mobility experience more smoothing.
Global Enterprises Harness Qwen to Drive Efficiency and Innovation
Alibaba also spotlighted how global industry leaders are leveraging Qwen to transform their operations, from accelerating product innovation to building smarter, more sustainable cities.
For example, Signify, the world leader in lighting, has launched the industry's first GenAI agent powered by Alibaba's self-developed large language model Qwen. By harnessing Qwen's advanced capability to effectively handle complex tasks, the GenAI agent has been integrated into Signify's connected street lighting system Interact City Flex that monitors, controls and manages street lighting, to further reduce energy consumption while boosting maintenance efficiency. Powered by Qwen, the upgraded system simplifies operation by allowing users to generate and deploy AI-driven dimming strategies through natural language commends. It also flags anomalies and provides solutions to improve efficiency on facility management and maintenance.
'Digital transformation in urban environments relies on intelligent systems that make city management smarter and more sustainable,' said Hans Nikol, Head of Open Innovation of Signify. 'By making use of Alibaba's Qwen model in our GenAI Agent, we're empowering cities to proactively reduce energy consumption and lower operational costs. This collaboration marks an important step in intelligent city management and underlines our commitment to innovation and our vision for greener, brighter cities.'
Quark AI Glasses: Alibaba's Entry into the Future of Wearable Intelligence
Alibaba has entered the AI wearables market with the debut of Quark AI Glasses, its first self-developed smart eyewear. Seamlessly powered by the Qwen large language model and Quark's multimodal AI capabilities, the device is designed to serve as an intelligent, all-day wearable assistant that blends style, comfort, and functionality.
Lightweight and ergonomically designed, Quark AI Glasses support hands-free calling, music streaming, real-time language translation, and meeting transcription—making them ideal for professionals, travelers, and tech-savvy users. The glasses are engineered to deliver smooth AI-enabled interactions, featuring long battery life and high-quality imaging to ensure a premium user experience.
A key highlight is the deep integration with Alibaba's ecosystem. Users can access navigation through Amap's innovative near-eye display system, optimized for walking and cycling. They can also use Alipay to watch and pay, compare prices on Taobao while shopping, receive travel alerts from Fliggy —all through voice interactions.
Quark AI Glasses are scheduled for official release in China by the end of 2025, marking a significant step in Alibaba's vision to bring ambient, context-aware AI into daily life.
As the Qwen series continues to evolve, Alibaba remains committed to open innovation, empowering developers, businesses, and governments worldwide to build the intelligent future. With over 400 million downloads and more than 140,000 derivative models created, the Qwen model series has become one of the most widely adopted open-source AI series globally.
About Alibaba Cloud:
Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud http://www.alibabacloud.com is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world's leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mid East Info
7 hours ago
- Mid East Info
Sandisk Showcases UltraQLCTM Technology Platform with Milestone Enterprise SSD Capacity at FMS 2025 - Middle East Business News and Information
Sandisk's new flagship client SSD is an industry-leader in performance and power efficiency for high-performance users Santa Clara, California – August, 2025: Sandisk today demonstrated a high-capacity 256TB1 NVMeTM enterprise SSD, a breakthrough in storage capacity, performance and power efficiency, made possible by Sandisk's new enterprise-grade UltraQLCTM platform. Offering extraordinary capacity, the UltraQLCTM platform marks a significant achievement in NAND architecture, built with a combination of BiCS8 QLC CBA NAND, custom controllers and advanced system optimizations. As workloads and business requirements evolve in the AI era, flash storage must become more customizable to match complex workloads. The new SANDISK® 256TB1 NVMeTM SSD, built on the UltraQLCTM platform, is designed for AI-driven, data-intensive workloads like data ingest, preparation, and fast AI data lakes with high-performance speeds and power efficiency, while improving TCO for high-capacity applications in hyperscale cloud. 'As we move into the next phase of the AI era, flash storage is becoming a critical enabler of intelligent, high-performance workloads,' said Khurram Ismail, Chief Product Officer at Sandisk. 'Our UltraQLCTM platform is the culmination of years of work and learnings to build a flexible and robust architecture that achieves extraordinary capacities and maximum performance while maintaining efficiency. This enables us to further expand our portfolio to meet AI demands at scale and helps our customers move faster, process more and turn data into real innovation.' The SANDISK® UltraQLCTM 256TB1 NVMeTM SSD sets a new benchmark for hyperscale flash storage, purpose-built for the fast, intelligent data lakes powering AI at scale. With lower latency, higher bandwidth, and greater reliability, it delivers the performance needed for today's most demanding AI workloads. Key innovations include: Direct Write QLC, which eliminates SLC buffering by enabling power-loss safe writes on the first pass BiCS8 2Tb QLC die that doubles storage density while maintaining compact die sizes UltraQLC TM power optimization, which uses Dynamic Frequency Scaling for up to 10% higher performance for a given power level 2 (projected) power optimization, which uses Dynamic Frequency Scaling for up to 10% higher performance for a given power level (projected) Scalable multi-core controller that helps ensure high throughput and endurance at extreme capacities Data Retention (DR) profile that reduces DR recycles by up to 33 percent3 (projected), improving drive reliability, resilience and continuous access to data while decreasing power consumption The SANDISK® SN670 128TB1 NVMeTM SSD and SANDISK® UltraQLCTM 256TB1 NVMeTM SSD will be available in U.2 form factor in the first half of 2026, with additional form factors available later in the year. Sandisk will host a keynote at FMS 2025 on Wednesday, August 6, at 11:40 AM, to highlight its UltraQLCTM platform and will demo its milestone 256TB1 NVMeTM SSD, alongside additional innovative storage solutions, at FMS Booth #607.
Mid East Info
a day ago
- Mid East Info
Fertiglobe Reports Resilient Q2 2025 Results, Reinforces Shareholder Commitment with At Least $131 million in Cash Returns for H1 2025
Fertiglobe reported Q2 revenues of $566 million (+14%, Y-o-Y), adjusted EBITDA of $176 million (+26%, Y-o-Y) and adjusted net profit attributable to shareholders of $12 million (+68% Y-o-Y). Fertiglobe demonstrated resilience in Q2 2025 despite external factors in Egypt. Fertiglobe's Q2 2025 own-produced sales volumes were 10% lower compared to the same period last year, while H1 2025 own-produced sales volumes were only 1% lower compared to last year. Excluding external factors and turnarounds, Q2 2025 own-produced sales volumes would have been up 4% Y-o-Y, while H1 2025 own-produced sales volumes would have increased 7% Y-o-Y. 2025 maintenance capex expected towards lower end of previous guidance ($145–170 million), reflecting the deferral of turnarounds following the completion of critical maintenance works during the downtime in Egypt. H1 2025 revenues were $1.26 billion (+20% Y-o-Y), adjusted EBITDA was $437 million (+36%, Y-o-Y) and adjusted profits attributable to shareholders were $85 million (-18% Y-o-Y or +3.5x Y-o-Y excl. one-off FX gains in H1 2024). In line with Fertiglobe's commitment to creating shareholder value, management proposes H1 2025 dividends of at least $100 million (4.4 fils per share), subject to Board approval in September and payment in October. Including $31 million in share buybacks in Q2 2025, total H1 2025 shareholder returns would amount to at least $131 million. Fertiglobe is set to realize $10 million annual run rate interest savings (6% EPS accretion), following the recent repricing of the $1.1 billion term loan in June 2025, reducing its interest margin to 90bps, the refinancing of its $300 million loan and credit rating upgrades. On track to deliver $15-21 million of cost savings by year-end, supported by ADNOC's commitment to optimize Fertiglobe's costs, showing early progress on the Grow 2030 Strategy. As part of its digital transformation, Fertiglobe deployed MEERAi, ADNOC's AI-powered board advisory tool, at its most recent Board meeting to support faster, data-driven decision-making through real-time insights. Market outlook: Urea prices are up 20% versus the Q2 2025 average to $488/t, supported by tight industry supply and emerging demand from key buying regions. Longer term, limited supply additions and growing demand across agricultural, industrial and emerging segments are expected to support prices. Fertiglobe is poised to capitalize on the recent recovery in urea prices, supported by a strong order book. Abu Dhabi, UAE – August, 2025: Fertiglobe (the 'Company') (ADX: FERTIGLB), the world's largest seaborne exporter of urea and ammonia combined, the largest nitrogen fertilizer producer in the Middle East and North Africa region and ADNOC's low carbon ammonia platform, today announced its financial results for the three-month and six-month periods ended 30 June 2025 ('Q2 2025' and 'H1 2025', respectively). In the second quarter of 2025, Fertiglobe reported revenue of $566 million, reflecting a 14% year-on-year increase, while adjusted EBITDA grew 26% to $176 million, with adjusted net profit attributable to shareholders stood at $12 million, representing a 68% increase compared to Q2 2024. In the first half of 2025, Fertiglobe reported revenue of $1.26 billion, reflecting a 20% increase year-on-year increase. Adjusted EBITDA for the period stood at $437 million, up 36% year-on-year, while adjusted net profit attributable to shareholders stood at $85 million, representing an 18% decline compared to the prior year, driven by a one-off FX gain in H1 2024. Ahmed El-Hoshy, CEO of Fertiglobe, commented: 'This quarter demonstrated Fertiglobe's growing operational resilience, with an adjusted EBITDA increase of 26% Y-o-Y. Fertiglobe remains strategically placed to deliver robust performance and maintain operational continuity amid challenging conditions and I am proud of how our team continued to execute with agility, discipline, while maintaining an unwavering focus on safety and long-term value creation. We capitalized on the downtime in Egypt to perform critical maintenance activities, successfully extending the turnaround cycle, with maintenance capex expected towards the lower end of our previous guidance at $145 million. Notably, excluding external factors and turnarounds, our own-produced sales volumes for the second quarter of 2025 would have been up 4% Y-o-Y, while H1 2025 own-produced sales volumes would have increased 7% Y-o-Y. Building on our strengthened platform and robust commercial capabilities, Fertiglobe is poised to capitalize on the recent recovery in urea prices, which are approximately 20% above Q2 2025 levels0F[1]. This pricing rebound is supported by robust import demand from key markets such as India and Ethiopia. In line with our commitment to deliver value to our shareholders, we propose H1 2025 dividends of at least $100 million (4.4 fils per share), subject to Board approval in September 2025 with payment in October 2025. Including the $31 million worth of shares bought back in Q2 2025, Fertiglobe provides one of the highest total return metrics in the industry at the combined $131 million cash returns to shareholders for H1 2025. With the continued support of ADNOC, we remain confident in our strategic path to become a globally integrated nitrogen champion and creating long-term value for shareholders, while continuing to innovate and differentiate our solutions that support global food security and enable the energy transition. We remain committed to our recently announced Grow 2030 Strategy to become a $1bn+ EBITDA global nitrogen champion by 2030. This strategy is anchored on four key pillars: operational excellence, customer proximity, nitrogen production expansion, and disciplined low-carbon growth. This includes Project Harvest – a 1 mtpa lower carbon ammonia facility currently under construction – which remains a core part of our decarbonization roadmap. In parallel, we continue to evaluate the development of Project Baytown in collaboration with ADNOC and ExxonMobil, as part of our broader efforts to advance low-carbon ammonia solutions globally. While Fertiglobe remains dedicated to advancing its low-carbon project portfolio, the Company recognizes that the global low-carbon ammonia market remains in the early stages of development, with regulatory frameworks and demand signals continuing to evolve. As such, and in line with Fertiglobe's disciplined approach to capital deployment across its low-carbon ammonia project pipeline, Fertiglobe has taken the decision to rephase Project Rabdan1F[2], a 1 mtpa low-carbon ammonia project and associated auto-thermal reformer. This decision reflects the Company's prudent investment strategy and commitment to timing capital allocation effectively and is consistent with the broader objectives of the Grow 2030 Strategy, particularly its focus on disciplined low-carbon growth. In addition, Fertiglobe expects its recently announced proposed acquisition of the distribution assets of Wengfu Australia to play a key role in strengthening its downstream presence in high-netback markets, in line with its strategic focus on customer proximity. Wengfu Australia's distribution assets are also projected to enhance supply chain resilience and unlock long-term distribution synergies. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is anticipated to close in H2 2025.' Dividends and capital structure: In line with Fertiglobe's commitment to creating and returning shareholder value, Fertiglobe's management proposes H1 2025 dividends of at least $100 million, subject to Board approval in September 2025 with payment in October 2025. Additionally, Fertiglobe continues to execute on its announced 2.5% Share Buyback Program, aimed at opportunistically capitalizing on the stock's attractive valuation. As of 1 August 2025, Fertiglobe repurchased 55 million shares, representing 0.66% of total outstanding shares. As of 30 June 2025, Fertiglobe reported a net debt position of $909 million, implying a consolidated net debt to LTM adjusted EBITDA ratio of 1.0x. This strong financial position enables the Company to effectively balance growth investments and shareholder distributions, supported by robust free cash flow generation and a solid balance sheet. Fertiglobe is also set to realize $10 million of annual run rate interest savings in 2025, following credit rating upgrades by S&P, Fitch, and Moody's and driven by ADNOC's acquisition of a majority stake in Fertiglobe. These savings are further underpinned by the refinancing of our $300 million loan through the internal ADNOC bank and the recent repricing of a $1.1 billion term loan, supporting lower financing costs and contributing to earnings accretion in the quarter. Investor and Analyst Conference Call On 4 August 2025 at 3:00 PM UAE (12:00 PM London, 7:00 AM New York), Fertiglobe will host a conference call for investors and analysts. To access the call please dial Investors can access the call and ask live questions by dialing one of the following numbers using the code: 464259 International: +44 808 189 0158 UAE: +971 800 03570 4553 UK: +44 808 189 0158 / +44 808 189 0158 (toll-free) United States: +1 646 233 4753 / +1 855 979 6654 (toll-free) Participants may also join via the webcast. Please pre-register and join here. About Fertiglobe: Fertiglobe is the world's largest seaborne exporter of urea and ammonia combined, and an early mover in sustainable ammonia. Fertiglobe's production capacity comprises of 6.6 million tons of urea and merchant ammonia, produced at four subsidiaries in the UAE, Egypt and Algeria, making it the largest producer of nitrogen fertilizers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and benefits from direct access to six key ports and distribution hubs on the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, and the Arab Gulf. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi and incorporated in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), Fertiglobe employs more than 2,700 employees. Fertiglobe is listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange ('ADX') under the symbol 'FERTIGLB' and ISIN 'AEF000901015.
Mid East Info
5 days ago
- Mid East Info
Alibaba Releases Wan2.2 to Uplift Cinematic Video Production - Middle East Business News and Information
The Industry ' s first open-source MoE large video generation model s offering superb control for global creators and developers Dubai, United Arab Emirates, August, 2025 – Alibaba has released Wan2.2, the industry's first open-source large video generation models incorporating the MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) architecture, that will significantly elevate the ability of creators and developers to produce cinematic-style videos with a single click. The Wan2.2 series feature a text-to-video model Wan2.2-T2V-A14B and image-to-video model Wan2.2-I2V-A14B, and Wan2.2-TI2V-5B, a hybrid model that supports both text-to-video and image-to-video generation tasks within a single unified framework. Built on the MoE architecture and trained on meticulously curated aesthetic data, Wan2.2-T2V-A14B and Wan2.2-I2V-A14B generates videos with cinematic-grade quality and aesthetics, offering creators precise control over key dimensions such as lighting, time of day, color tone, camera angle, frame size, composition, focal length, etc. The two MoE models also demonstrate significant enhancements in producing complex motions – including vivid facial expressions, dynamic hand gestures, and intricate sports movements. Additionally, the models deliver realistic representations with enhanced instruction following and adherence to physical laws. To address the issue of high computational consumption in video generation caused by long tokens, Wan2.2-T2V-A14B and Wan2.2-I2V-A14B implement a two-expert design in the denoising process of diffusion models, including a high-noise expert focusing on overall scene layout and a low-noise expert to refine details and textures. Though both models comprise a total of 27 billion parameters, only 14 billion parameters are activated per step, reducing computational consumption by up to 50%. Wan2.2 incorporates fine-grained aesthetic tuning through a cinematic-inspired prompt system that categorizes key dimensions such as lighting, illumination, composition, and color tone. This approach enables Wan2.2 to accurately interpret and convey users' aesthetic intentions during the generation process. To enhance generalization capabilities and creative diversity, Wan2.2 was trained on a substantially larger dataset, featuring 65.6% increase in image data and 83.2% increase in video data compared to Wan2.1. Wan2.2 demonstrates enhanced performance in producing complex scenes and motions, as well as an enhanced capacity for artistic expression. A Compact Model to Enhance Efficiency and Scalability: Wan2.2 also introduces its hybrid model Wan2.2-TI2V-5B, a dense model utilizes a high-compression 3D VAE architecture to achieve a temporal and spatial compression ratio of 4x16x16, enhancing the overall information compression rate to 64. The TI2V-5B can generate a 5-second 720P video in several minutes on a single consumer-grade GPU, enabling efficiency and scalability to developers and content creators. Wan2.2 models are available to download on Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud's open-source community, ModelScope. A major contributor to the global open source community, Alibaba open sourced four Wan2.1 models in February 2025 and Wan 2.1-VACE (Video All-in-one Creation and Editing) in May 2025. To date, the models have attracted over 5.4 million downloads on Hugging Face and ModelScope. About Alibaba Cloud: Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world's leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.
