Alibaba Supports Dakar Youth Olympic Games with Wan3.0 and Olympic Dedicated Cloud

Counting from the birth of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, a full 130 years later, the Olympic multi-sport event has finally set foot on the African continent for the first time. And the coordinates of this historic first stop fall on Dakar, the capital of Senegal at the westernmost tip of the African continent.

On the opening night of the Dakar Youth Olympic Games, fireworks filled the sky and the cheers of tens of thousands of spectators intertwined above the stadium, with the whole of Africa boiling over for this historic moment that had been awaited for a century. It was at such a highly anticipated opening ceremony that 100 global Youth Olympic volunteers, originally separated by thousands of miles, completed a cross-time-and-space drumming performance together on the same stage. The behind-the-scenes technology that made this hundred-person ensemble possible was Alibaba's self-developed video generation large model: Wan3.0.

On the African home turf thousands of miles away, on what grounds could a Chinese large model stand at the center of the opening ceremony stage?

01. Together on Stage: When Millennia-Old African Drumbeats Meet Chinese AI

The answer lies hidden in Senegal's traditional culture.

In the local Wolof language, there is a soul word called "Teranga," meaning "ultimate hospitality"—even the official theme song of this Dakar Youth Olympic Games is directly named after it. And in Senegal's traditional customs, at every grand celebration and welcome moment, locals strike the drumhead with one hand and hold a wooden stick in the other, sounding the century-old national treasure instrument—the "Sabar" drum.

To help the host country spread this unique hospitality to the world, the Alibaba team and the Youth Olympic Organizing Committee jointly launched a global AI co-creation. One hundred young volunteers from around the world only needed to provide an everyday photo in advance, and the Wan3.0 large model could precisely identify their facial features and dress them in green, yellow, and red T-shirts, echoing the colors of the Senegalese national flag.

Dakar Youth Olympic Games opening ceremony site

At the opening ceremony, below the stage African local musicians beat drums, while on the big screen a hundred global volunteers performed in unison across the distance. When millennia-old African drumbeats meet Chinese AI, these 60 seconds spanning mountains and seas became the first greeting Africa's Olympics sent to the world.

02. Interaction: Global Participants Drum the African Drum Together

But if this welcoming drumbeat were only sounded for one minute at the opening ceremony, it would be too much of a pity.

To let more people personally experience the collision of technology and culture, at the Festival Site outside the venues, where foot traffic is densest in Dakar, Alibaba specially built a 75-square-meter AIGC interactive space—"The Teranga Beat." This pavilion brings the same AI generation capability as the opening ceremony directly offline, turning it into an interactive experience open to all members of the public, one that anyone can try with zero barriers.

Alibaba's AIGC interactive space at the Dakar Festival Site

Stepping into this interactive space, the experience flow is designed with a strong local sense of ritual. Visitors receive a traditional drumstick at the entrance and strike the drumhead in front of the screen to awaken an AI assistant equipped with both English and French; after entering their name and taking a photo on site, the screen immediately switches to a drumming interactive mini-game.

Within the mere dozen or so seconds that visitors follow the rhythm and drum interactively, the Wan3.0 large model has already completed real-time rendering in the background, generating a personalized video. In the footage, the participant is not only dressed in authentic Senegalese traditional attire but also placed in African-flavored scenes such as the opening ceremony plaza, traditional painted wooden boats, and baobab trees, transformed into a local drummer celebrating with the drum.

On-site AIGC drumming experience

After the experience, on-site equipment also prints out a physical souvenir card (Beat Card) as a gift. Visitors only need to take out their phones and scan the QR code on the back of the card to not only save this exclusive video as a memento but also project their AI avatar with one click onto the giant drum screen at the center of the plaza, achieving a virtual joint performance alongside participants from around the world.

At the same time, the exhibition area also features a Youth Olympic-specific intelligent Q&A system developed based on the Qwen large model. This system supports real-time interaction in both English and French, and can answer fluently whether it is queries about event schedules or popularization of Senegal's local culture. Throughout the Games, whether local residents encountering AI for the first time or tourists from all over the world, everyone can use multimodal large models to immersively integrate into this Olympic celebration on African home turf.

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

The opening ceremony co-creation and the Olympic plaza interaction on the front stage pushed the lively atmosphere of the African home turf to its peak; while behind the scenes, invisible to the audience, another set of digital infrastructure was supporting the smooth operation of the entire Games.

This is the first time in African history that the continent has independently hosted an Olympic multi-sport event, and many core digital systems needed to be built from scratch. To support the intensive 14-day competition schedule, Alibaba Cloud, based on the Apsara Enterprise Edition dedicated cloud foundation, deployed the first Olympic event dedicated cloud locally in Dakar. This cloud foundation, adopting a dual-AZ high-availability architecture, directly carries the various core systems, ensuring zero interruption of core business operations during the Games.

Relying on this locally deployed dedicated cloud, the Dakar Youth Olympic Games also achieved "paid ticketing for all sessions" for the first time in history. Online sales covering 7 major venues and more than 1 million tickets, as well as rapid ticket verification via more than 100 PDA devices on site, all run on this cloud system.

And that is not all—the most valuable move in the entire technology delivery actually happened after the event concluded.

In the past, major international sporting events often faced the problem of idle resources—"once the competition stops, the equipment is withdrawn"; but Alibaba Cloud made it clear at the very beginning of the architecture design: after the Youth Olympic Games end, this dedicated cloud foundation will not be removed, but will be handed over in its entirety to the relevant departments of the Senegalese government and directly transformed into a "national sovereign cloud." It will serve as a long-term Olympic digital legacy, continuing to carry the local government affairs and public digitalization construction, and even become computing infrastructure radiating across the entire West African region.

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

On the front stage, it used AI large models to sound millennia-old drumbeats, turning cutting-edge technology into a cultural experience that everyone can participate in; behind the scenes, it left a truly operational sovereign cloud in Senegal, moving from serving a single sporting event to long-term empowerment of a country's daily operations.

The Youth Olympic Games last only a short 14 days, but when the Olympic flame slowly goes out, the story of this cloud and the African continent has only just begun.