Airbus' Skywise is cleared to land in China with Alibaba

Airbus has signed a major cooperation agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and data intelligence arm of the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group, to establish a Skywise Data Center in the Middle Kingdom.

The positioning in China of the data generated by the local fleet is a necessary compliance requirement so that Airbus can offer Chinese airlines the full spectrum of services and tools of Skywise.

“We are delighted to offer Skywise to our customers in China and to create value from data together, benefiting the industry at large, as well as promoting the application of advanced analytics in the Chinese civil aviation industry,” said Marc Fontaine, Airbus Digital Transformation Officer.

To date, some 1,800 Airbus aircraft are operating in China. In addition, Spring Airlines, Yunnan Hongtu Airlines and Zhejiang Loong Airlines have already been connected to the European aircraft manufacturer's service platform since the beginning of the year.

As a reminder, Skywise uses Palantir Technologies for the integration of data which are then notably hosted by Amazon's cloud services. With Alibaba Cloud, the Skywise platform will leverage two of the world's leading cloud computing platforms.

More than 90 airlines for nearly 7,000 aircraft are now connected to the Skywise platform around the world. Airbus has set a target of reaching 100 operators before the end of the year.