Over 90% of Cyberport's AI supercomputing resources in use

Hong Kong government’s Artificial Intelligence Subsidy Scheme (AISS) has approved 10 projects utilising supercomputing resources since January, with over 90% of the allocated computing power currently in use in Cyberport.

Cyberport’s AI Supercomputing Centre (AISC) began operations in December last year to enhance Hong Kong's research and development (R&D)capabilities in HealthTech, AI, data science, advanced manufacturing, and new energy technology. The government has allocated HK$3 billion for the three-year AISS through Cyberport to encourage full utilisation of the supercomputing centre's resources.

Speaking at a sharing session last Friday (4 July), Hendrick Sin (pictured second left), chairman of the committee of the AISS, said that the scheme has received around 20 applications since its launch and approved 10 projects across various research areas, including local large language models (LLMs), new materials, synthetic biology, and medical large models, totaling around HK$300 million in subsidies.

“These approved projects began utilising the supercomputing resources in January this year, and currently, over 90% of the allocated computing power is in use. This fully reflects the strong and growing demand for computing power from researchers and the industry,” Sin added. 

For example, one of the AISS projects by the Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Centre (HKGAI) created a large-scale multilingual audio corpus containing 500,000 hours of high-quality recordings in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. This corpus captures the diverse accents within Hong Kong’s unique trilingual environment and supports precise training and fine-tuning for automatic speech recognition (ASR), textto-speech (TTS), and dialogue systems.

Currently, Cyberport hosts over 400 AI companies and start-ups, with more than 120 new additions in the past year, according to the release. It has also attracted several key strategic AI enterprises such as iFLYTEK (科大訊飛) and Xunfei Healthcare (訊飛醫療). In addition, Cyberport has facilitated collaborations with Baidu, Huawei, Cisco, and Ricoh, leveraging their R&D capabilities in computing power development, large model construction, algorithms, and data science to foster AI research, innovation, and applications. 

Cyberport has also partnered with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) to launch the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) Sandbox, with the supercomputing centre providing a dedicated platform to support the development of generative AI applications in areas such as risk management, fraud detection, and customer interaction.

Furthermore, Cyberport has entered into agreements with seven local tertiary institutions to jointly promote AI-related applied research, accelerate the growth of start-ups, and nurture talent. Additionally, Cyberport actively fosters collaboration and integration within the AI and data industries, hosting over 50 AI-related promotional events that have benefitted more than 8,500 participants.

Rocky Cheng, CEO of Cyberport, said: “As Hong Kong’s AI accelerator, Cyberport leverages the AISC as its engine to build a comprehensive AI ecosystem, fueling innovation in R&D and applications while empowering the intelligent transformation of various industries.”

“At the same time, it attracts leading enterprises from around the globe to establish a presence in Hong Kong and facilitates collaboration with industry leaders, combining their R&D strengths in computing power development, large model construction, algorithms, and data science to leverage Hong Kong’s strengths in fundamental research and internationalisation,” Cheng added.

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