Alibaba's "Cloud for Youth" Wins Education Innovation Award for Bridging China’s Rural Digital Divide

The initiative has brought more than 300 cloud-driven learning classrooms, benefiting more than 300,000 students and educators in rural areas in China.
The AI transformed classrooms leverages Wuying cloud computing infrastructure and integrate with Alibaba’s LLM Qwen.

"Cloud for Youth," an innovative education initiative launched by Alibaba to tackle the digital divide in education across rural China, has recently been awarded with the Global Smart Education Innovation Prize 2025. The Prize was selected by experts from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and different universities across regions to recognize innovative technology solutions in smart education.

The program was recognized under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Action for its significant contribution to driving equitable education.

The award and recognition celebrates the program’s success in building a sustainable, human-centric digital education model — one that offers a replicable blueprint for addressing educational inequality in underserved communities worldwide.

“We’ve realized that the next big educational divide won’t be defined by geography difference – urban versus rural – but by disparities in understanding and harnessing artificial intelligence,” said Huang Guijing, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Education and Head of the “Cloud for Youth” initiative at the UNESCO Digital Learning Week in Paris in September.

This was the third year that Alibaba was invited to speak at the UNESCO Summit to share its innovation and practices in driving smart education to narrow the digital divide in rural China.

Launched in 2021 by the Alibaba Foundation, “Cloud for Youth” has since established more than 300 “AI Cloud Classrooms” across 25 provinces in China. These classrooms transformed traditional computer labs into dynamic, cloud-powered learning hubs, equipped with over a hundred of AI-driven virtual teachers. To date, the program has empowered over 300,000 students and educators in rural areas in China.

By hosting all learning resources in the cloud, the initiative ensures that students can learn anytime, anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. This flexibility breaks down barriers of time and location, making quality education truly accessible.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Wuying cloud computing infrastructure, all computational needs for the AI Cloud Classrooms are handled through Alibaba’s data centers. This eliminates the burden and cost of maintaining or upgrading local hardware, a critical advantage for under-resourced rural schools. As a result, students in remote villages now enjoy access to the same digital teaching resources once exclusive to elite urban institutions.

Moreover, the seamless integration of Qwen, Alibaba’s large language models (LLMs), with Wuying cloud computing enables both teachers and students to engage more vividly in AI-driven innovation. For instance, a 12-year-old student in Yunnan Province in Southwest China recently used the Cloud for Youth platform to generate a customized biology lesson with just a single sentence prompt, then interacted in real time with a virtual AI teacher in the subject matter.

“Cloud for Youth” also aligns with Alibaba’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategy. Beyond leveling the playing field in access to educational tools, applications, and learning environments, it is accelerating the digital transformation of elementary and secondary education across rural China.

The “Cloud for Youth” initiative is scheduled to deepen its collaboration with education authorities to co-develop LLM-powered educational applications tailored to local curricula and learning needs. A key priority will be fostering AI literacy among rural youth, tackling educational inequity and elevating the overall quality of learning nationwide.

This article was originally published on Alizila written by Crystal Liu.

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Alibaba's "Cloud for Youth" Wins Education Innovation Award for Bridging China’s Rural Digital Divide

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