At Africa's Olympic debut, Alibaba has handed in a "two-sided answer sheet".

Counting from the birth of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, exactly 130 years later, the comprehensive Olympic event finally set foot on the African continent for the first time. The coordinate of this historic first stop is Dakar, the capital of Senegal, located at the westernmost tip of the African continent.

On the opening night of the Dakar Youth Olympic Games, fireworks all over the sky and the cheers of tens of thousands of spectators intertwined above the stadium, and the whole Africa was boiling for this historic moment that had been awaited for a hundred years. At this highly anticipated opening ceremony, 100 global Youth Olympic Games volunteers who were originally thousands of miles apart completed a cross-time-and-space simultaneous drumming performance. The behind-the-scenes technology that made this 100-person ensemble a reality is Alibaba's self-developed video generation large model: Wan3.0.

On the African home ground thousands of miles away, what enables a Chinese large model to stand at the center of the opening ceremony stage?

01. Performing Together: When Thousand-year-old African Drum Beats Meet Chinese AI

The answer is hidden in the traditional culture of Senegal.

In the local Wolof language, there is a core word called "Teranga", which means "the ultimate hospitality". Even the official theme song of this Dakar Youth Olympic Games is directly named after it. In Senegalese traditional customs, during grand celebrations and welcome moments, local people will pat the drumhead with one hand and hold a wooden stick with the other, striking the century-old national treasure-level musical instrument - the "Sabar" drum.

To help the host country spread this unique hospitality to the whole world, the Alibaba team and the Youth Olympic Games Organizing Committee jointly launched a global AI co-creation campaign. For 100 young volunteers from all over the world, as long as they provide a daily photo in advance, the Wan3.0 large model can accurately identify their facial features, change them into T-shirts in green, yellow and red to echo the color scheme of the Senegalese national flag.

Scene of the Opening Ceremony of the Dakar Youth Olympic Games

At the opening ceremony, African local musicians played drums under the stage, and 100 global volunteers performed together across the distance on the big screen. When the thousand-year-old African drum beats meet Chinese AI, this 60-second performance that crosses mountains and seas becomes the first greeting that the African Olympic Games sends to the world.

02. Interaction: Global Participants Strike the African Drum Together

However, it would be a pity if this welcoming drumbeat only sounds for one minute at the opening ceremony.

To let more people experience the collision of technology and culture in person, Alibaba has specially built a 75-square-meter AIGC interactive space called "The Teranga Beat" at the Dakar Olympic Square (Festival Site), the most crowded area outside the competition venues. This exhibition hall directly brings the same AI generation capability used in the opening ceremony offline, turning it into an interactive experience open to all people that everyone can get started with zero threshold.

Alibaba's AIGC Interactive Space at Dakar Olympic Square

Walking into this interactive space, the experience process is designed with strong local ritual sense. Visitors pick up a traditional drumstick at the entrance, strike the drumhead in front of the screen, and then wake up the AI assistant supporting both English and French languages. After entering their names and taking photos on site, the screen will immediately switch to a small interactive drumming game.

Within just a dozen seconds when visitors interact by drumming along with the beat, the Wan3.0 large model has completed real-time rendering in the background and generated a personal exclusive video. In the video, the experiencer not only changes into authentic Senegalese traditional costumes, but also stands in African characteristic scenes such as the opening ceremony square, traditional painted wooden boats and baobab trees, incarnating as a local drummer to celebrate by drumming.

On-site AIGC Drumming Experience

After the experience, the on-site equipment will print a physical commemorative card (Beat Card) as a gift. Visitors only need to take out their mobile phones and scan the QR code on the back of the card, they can not only save this exclusive video for memory, but also send their AI avatar to the giant drum-shaped screen in the center of the square with one click, realizing a virtual ensemble with participants from all over the world.

Meanwhile, the exhibition area is also equipped with a Youth Olympic Games exclusive intelligent Q&A system developed based on the Qwen large model. This system supports real-time interaction in both English and French, and can respond fluently no matter for event schedule inquiries or popular science about local Senegalese culture. Throughout the whole competition period, both local residents who are exposed to AI for the first time and tourists from all over the world can immerse themselves in this African-hosted Olympic celebration with the help of the multimodal large model.

03. From "Olympic Dedicated Cloud" to "National Sovereign Cloud"

The co-creation at the opening ceremony on the front stage and the interactions at the Olympic Square push the lively atmosphere of the African home ground to the peak; behind the scenes invisible to the audience, another set of digital infrastructure is supporting the stable operation of the entire event.

This is the first time in African history to independently host a comprehensive Olympic event, and many core digital systems need to be built from scratch. To support the 14-day intensive competition schedule, Alibaba Cloud deployed the first Olympic event dedicated cloud locally in Dakar based on the Apsara Enterprise Edition dedicated cloud base. This cloud base adopting dual-AZ high-availability architecture directly carries all core systems, ensuring zero-interruption operation of core businesses during the event period.

Relying on this locally deployed dedicated cloud, the Dakar Youth Olympic Games also realized "full-session paid ticketing" for the first time in history. The online sales of more than 1 million tickets covering 7 major venues, as well as the fast ticket verification of more than 100 PDA devices on site, all run on this cloud system.

Moreover, the most valuable move in the whole technical delivery actually takes place after the event ends.

In the past, large-scale international events often faced the problem of idle resources that "once the competition stops, the equipment will be removed". But Alibaba Cloud has made it clear at the beginning of the architecture design: after the Youth Olympic Games, this dedicated cloud base will not be removed, but will be handed over as a whole to the relevant departments of the Senegalese government, and directly transformed into a "national sovereign cloud". As a long-term Olympic digital heritage, it will continue to support local government affairs and public digital construction, and even become a computing power infrastructure radiating the entire West African region.

At this special Dakar Youth Olympic Games, what Alibaba has delivered in Africa is actually a "two-sided" answer sheet that goes beyond the event itself:

On the front stage, it uses the AI large model to strike the thousand-year-old drum beats, turning cutting-edge technology into a cultural experience that everyone can participate in; behind the scenes, it leaves a truly operable sovereign cloud in Senegal, shifting from serving a single sports event to empowering the daily operation of a country in the long term.

The competition period of the Youth Olympic Games is only 14 days, but when the Olympic flame is slowly extinguished, the story between this cloud and the African continent has just begun.