On March 12th, it was announced that Lenovo Holdings signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Zhipu AI.

Both parties expressed their intention to continuously develop and optimize products/services in areas such as AI PC business, AI servers, and other hardware, proprietary general large models, and intelligent solutions, as well as to cooperate in the research and development of vertical large models in related fields such as smart manufacturing, financial technology, digital marketing, and biotechnology.

What kind of sparks will this powerful combination of an established brand and a rising star in AI create?

The first person to try the crab

Earlier this month, Lenovo announced its 2023 financial results. During the reporting period, Lenovo's revenue reached $15.721 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 3%; net profit was $337 million, down 23% year-on-year.

Lenovo Holdings expects a net loss attributable to equity holders of approximately 3.6 billion to 4 billion yuan for 2023 (the net profit attributable to equity holders in 2022 was 1.167 billion yuan).

As one of the business segments under Lenovo Holdings, Lenovo, of course, could not escape the "claws" of declining net profit.

It is not difficult to see from the financial report that Lenovo's intelligent device business (IDG) remains the mainstay, achieving revenue of $12.36 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 6.7%.

The PC business is particularly impressive, with a market share of nearly 24%, far exceeding the global average.

As a leader in the PC industry, Lenovo was the first to propose and implement the concept of AI PC, and recently, it also released the latest generation of business AI PCs.

By choosing Zhipu AI, which bears the most OpenAI-like qualities, Lenovo has demonstrated its determination and perseverance in following the AI trend.

The first person to try the crab often pioneers a new era.

It is not surprising that Lenovo chose Zhipu AI. Its strength, originating from the "Tsinghua System," speaks for itself.

As of October last year, Zhipu AI has accumulated over 2.5 billion yuan in financing. Participants include Tencent, Meituan, and numerous well-known VCs, as well as old shareholder Social Security Fund Zhongguancun Independent Innovation Fund. The fund's manager is Legend Capital, a subsidiary of Lenovo Holdings.

With this cooperation, the two parties can be considered even closer.

In its 2023 interim report, Lenovo Holdings showcased its strength in the AI field: it has invested in over 200 companies across the AI "basic layer-technical layer-model layer-platform layer-application layer," covering areas such as underlying hardware and software, data, computing power, algorithms, and applications.

Similarly, Lenovo has not overlooked AI's "good partner" - cloud computing.

In terms of timing, Lenovo and Microsoft almost simultaneously deployed cloud computing in 2014, followed by the completion of Lenovo Cloud Technology's incubation.

Lenovo not only delivers AI servers with delivery capabilities across public, private, and hybrid clouds, such as "ThinkSystem" and "Wentian," but also has a hybrid cloud brand, Lenovo xCloud.

In the investment field, Lenovo Ventures and Legend Capital have "coincidentally" invested in multiple cloud computing companies, including SMARTX, a provider of hyperconverged products and enterprise cloud solutions; CloudTeng, a provider of enterprise-level cloud platform products and services; Feizhi Cloud, a provider of multi-cloud management platform software and services; UCloud, a leading independent third-party cloud computing service platform in China; and Yundu Tech, a cloud computing infrastructure software enterprise.

In addition, Lenovo is also known as the world's largest computing power infrastructure provider. With its "new IT" technology architecture covering all elements of "end-edge-cloud-network-intelligence," it has delved deeply into the computing power industry and proposed the "Puhui" computing power proposition.

Based on its own "Puhui" computing power advantage, Lenovo has built a rich portfolio of edge computing solutions in the field of edge computing, with edge cloud services and edge hardware products.

It is evident that Lenovo is also skilled in cloud computing.

Written at the end

Lenovo, which is also fully invested in AI, is reshaping all its businesses.

Based on its abundant reserves in cloud computing, big data, AI, and many other cutting-edge technologies, how will Lenovo "play" with new IT, and what kind of innovations will it bring to AI PCs?