Chinese tech heavyweight, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, announced a partnership with US tech firm Nvidia on Sept 24, joining forces in the field of physical AI, as part of a broader push to bolster its technological advancements in AI.

Physical AI refers to the integration of AI into autonomous systems, enabling them to perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the physical world. While traditional AI primarily processes data like text or images, physical AI focuses on spatial relationships and the physical behavior of the 3D world. This is achieved by training AI models with data generated from highly accurate simulations of real-world environments.

Alibaba Cloud's AI platform will integrate with Nvidia's physical AI software to provide users with data preprocessing, synthetic data generation, model training and evaluation, and robot reinforcement learning, according to Alibaba. The technology could significantly shorten the development cycle for embodied intelligence technology, assisted driving, and other applications.

The announcement came during the Apsara Conference 2025, Alibaba Cloud's annual flagship technology conference.