From the slopes to your screen: How cloud technology is transforming the Olympic Games

As the skier leapt and twisted her body into the air, time slowed down and the camera spun around her, allowing her fans to savour every precise detail of the complex acrobatic sequence she had honed over the years.

This viewing experience sounds like a scene from a science fiction movie, except that it was happening in real time during the recent Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games. 

As the world watched elite athletes stretch the limits of human potential, artificial intelligence (AI) from Alibaba Cloud worked quietly behind the scenes to advance the Olympic experience. 

Whether it was capturing mesmerising 360-degree replays, satiating every fan’s curiosity on the Olympics website, or augmenting the efficiency of broadcasters, Alibaba’s cloud and AI technologies made this the most digitally advanced Olympics ever.

Alibaba has partnered with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since 2017 to transform the games for fans, athletes and broadcasters. This year also saw the introduction of Alibaba’s advanced large language model (LLM) known as Qwen that lets fans interact with Olympics content like never before.  

Capturing every slice of greatness

Instant replays have long let fans relive moments of sporting triumph and heartbreak. Now, AI empowers them to examine every second of action with unprecedented clarity.

Across both outdoor slopes and indoor arenas at the Winter Olympics, dense arrays of cameras captured pivotal moments from multiple angles. These fed into Alibaba’s Real-Time 360º Replay system, delivering immersive replays with fluid virtual camera sweeps and cinematic stroboscopic effects.

When a figure skater pirouettes across the rink, Alibaba’s AI algorithm can generate a 3D reconstruction of her performance in just 15 to 20 seconds, fast enough for broadcasters to insert augmented replays seamlessly into live commentary.

The algorithm is also able to separate the athlete from complex backgrounds such as snow and ice.

Alibaba Cloud first introduced BulletTime effects in 2022 at the Beijing Games, and this year, it rolled out the Spacetime Slices capability that combined multiple phases of the athlete’s movement into a single composite image.

The Real-Time 360º Replay systems were deployed across 17 sports and disciplines, including ice hockey, freestyle skiing, figure skating and ski jumping.

Discovering every Olympic detail

Behind every thrilling broadcast moment lies an enormous volume of video content that must be tagged, archived and made searchable.

As each competitive event unfolded, Alibaba’s advanced Qwen LLM was generating rich metadata for the captured videos.

Alibaba Cloud has been working with Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) to develop the Automatic Media Description (AMD) System, which automatically identifies athletes and key moments, generates event descriptions and tags video assets with labels, vastly reducing manual processing time during 391 competition sessions.

When every video has such rich metadata, it allows the OBS team to retrieve content rapidly and accurately, then distribute it to broadcasters easily. 

The Qwen family of LLMs was also used to power the Olympics website, where users can chat and ask any questions about past and present games. Alibaba Cloud’s Sports AI, a media archiving solution, has organised and digitised decades of Olympic footage into a searchable library.

As such, if you type the prompt: “Tell me more about Alysa Liu”, the site’s chatbot will pull up details about the US figure skating champion, her entire sporting record, and point you to her event highlight videos. 

The same Qwen-powered technology is powering personalised audio guides at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is also helping National Olympic Committees rapidly locate documents and policies through natural language queries. 

Faster, clearer and better content

It is not just fans and the Olympic body that have benefited from the cloud and AI. The job of delivering the games to audiences worldwide has become easier and faster with advanced content distribution.

For six decades, broadcasters relied on expensive and bulky satellite equipment to capture and deliver live sporting events. Today, they can travel much lighter as Alibaba has made its OBS Cloud the primary distribution platform for broadcast content at the Winter Games. 

The transformation began at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 with the debut of OBS Cloud. By 2022 at the Beijing Winter Olympics, over 20 broadcasters were using the platform, leading to a 30 per cent reduction in onsite broadcast personnel compared to the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. 

At Milano Cortina in 2026, the cloud platform delivered 442 live video feeds for 42 broadcasters worldwide. Media Rights Holders (MRHs) had access to 4,198 video highlights captured by the Real-Time 360º Replay systems.

Alibaba Cloud’s Apsara Video technology powered cloud-based live streaming and broadcasting for Milano Cortina 2026, enabling global media access to press conferences, IOC daily briefings, and post-competition athlete interviews in real time.

Smaller broadcasters also benefitted from the OBS Olympic Video Player (OVP), which allowed them to access professional-grade broadcast capabilities without heavy upfront investments.

Ms Kirsty Coventry, International Olympic Committee president, says: “Every Olympic Games leaves its own mark in terms of technological innovation. With Alibaba’s Cloud technologies and Qwen models, these Games have set a new benchmark for intelligence and creativity.”

Dr Feifei Li, senior vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, president of International Business, says: “Milano Cortina 2026 marks a milestone with the first use of LLM technologies in Olympic history, powered by Alibaba’s Qwen models.”

“Our cloud and AI-powered systems that supported Milano Cortina 2026 demonstrate our dedication to enabling smarter operations, deeper engagement, and new possibilities for the Olympic Movement.”

Learn more about Alibaba Cloud and how it can be applied at scale here.