BEIJING (PingWest) — China’s tech giant Baidu has directed significant funding into artificial intelligence over the past few years. The company made a new announcement recently to deepen its investments in new infrastructure areas including AI, chipsets, cloud computing, data centers, and more over the next decade.

The largest provider of Chinese internet search plans to deploy over 5 million AI cloud servers, approximately representing half global server shipments in 2019, and 7 times the hash rate of the top 500 super computers around the world.

Baidu has trained over 1 million AI talents so far and opened deep learning and AI courses in a joint effort with China’s 200 universities, including Fudan University, Wuhan University, and Nankai University. The search giant also trained thousands of AI professors and instructors teaching at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and more top Chinese universities.

Baidu CEO Wang Haifeng said that “New Infrastructure will be the new driver for China's economic development in the coming decades, and emerging technologies such as AI, cloud computing, 5G, IoT and blockchain are its key technological pillars. As an AI platform company, Baidu will use its many achievements and years of practical experience in AI technology to help speed up the development of new infrastructure and facilitate implementation of AI so that all industries can leverage it for unprecedented new momentum.”