The “Games cloud” built for the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games will not be switched off when the closing ceremony ends — it will be handed over whole to Senegal and become the country’s national cloud platform, a digital legacy Chinese engineers designed from day one, The Paper reported. The fourth Youth Olympic Games opened Nov. 1 Beijing time at Abdoulaye Wade Stadium in Dakar, marking the first time an Olympic-series event has been held on the African continent.
About 2,700 young athletes are competing across 25 sports at three venues — Dakar, Diamniadio and Saly — with China sending a delegation of 66 athletes to contest 21 sports. IOC President Kirsty Coventry, speaking ahead of the flag-raising at the stadium, said the Games “break many boundaries” and are a true symbol of Africa’s youth and vitality, while adding that the event opens doors of opportunity for a new generation across the continent and the wider world.
A First for Africa, and a First for Olympic Cloud Delivery
For more than a century, the Olympic movement has expanded its global footprint, but no Olympic-series event had ever been staged in Africa before Dakar 2026. The Youth Games fill that gap, giving the continent a platform to showcase its sporting potential, cultural diversity and youth energy.
Among the many “firsts” at these Games is the technology backbone. Alibaba Cloud, an IOC worldwide partner, built the first Olympic dedicated cloud base for Senegal, supporting event operations and the global viewing experience. Unlike every previous Olympic cloud deployment — which ran on public cloud nodes in developed countries and regions — this platform was deployed in a local data center in Senegal, a first for Olympic digital infrastructure delivery, according to Liu Guohua, vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group and general manager of its dedicated cloud business, in a pre-opening online briefing with The Paper.
That distinction matters because it is the first time the service has landed in a developing country where Alibaba Cloud has no public cloud nodes. “This is a brand-new practice in the delivery model of Olympic digital infrastructure,” Liu said.
What Runs on the Cloud in Dakar
Once the platform was up, all of the Dakar 2026 core business systems ran on the Olympic dedicated cloud. Global audiences watch the athletes’ performances through OBS Cloud-based broadcasting, relying on Alibaba Cloud’s worldwide data centers.
Dakar 2026 is also the first Youth Olympics in which every session is ticketed, and the ticketing system — supporting user registration, schedule viewing, booking and on-site verification — runs on the cloud with capacity for a million tickets. An electronic visa system and a one-stop athlete service platform cover everything from food, lodging and transport to schedules, health consultations and maps, helping Senegal move from paper visas to electronic visas while giving athletes worldwide end-to-end services.
Because the “Games cloud” will be transferred in its entirety to become the “national cloud” after the event, engineers had to build for what comes next from the start. The systems used for athletes’ cloud-based e-visas will form the foundation of Senegal’s national e-visa system. To guarantee continuity of Games services, Alibaba Cloud completed multiple disaster-recovery drills, Liu said, adding that passing the Olympic-level test of high availability and security compliance shows Chinese cloud computing being brought to African markets still in the early stages of digitalization.
More Firsts on the Field of Play
The breakthroughs extend well beyond the server room. Wushu becomes an official medal sport at the Youth Olympics for the first time, while baseball5 and street breaking make their debuts as emerging disciplines.
The Games also set a new benchmark for gender equality: male and female athletes each account for 50 percent of the field, with 73 men’s and 73 women’s events plus seven mixed events. For the first time, a Refugee Olympic Team competes at the Youth Games, with six athletes entered in athletics, judo and taekwondo.
Beyond competition, Olympic classrooms for students, youth volunteer programs and community cultural activities are drawing local young people deeply into the event. Renovated sports facilities will remain in use for Senegalese people after the Games, which organizers say will leave lasting opportunities in sport, education and talent development.
AI Drums at the Opening Ceremony
Chinese technology also shaped the opening ceremony itself. An AI-generated drum performance drew the attention of everyone in the stadium: a video produced with the Wan video-generation model wove the performances of 100 drummers from around the world into a single frame, set to the signature rhythms of traditional Senegalese African drums.
Coventry welcomed the role of the Olympic worldwide partner in the moment. “I am very pleased to see our Olympic worldwide partner helping present more wonderful moments of this historic occasion,” she said. “Relying on cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology, Alibaba makes the Games run more smoothly and brings audiences around the world closer to the field of play.”
From Tokyo 1964 to Paris 2024 to Dakar 2026
The Olympics have embraced technology for decades. At the 1964 Tokyo Games, the IOC first tried broadcasting events via satellite television — a major technical leap at the time. Sixty years later, at Paris 2024, the Olympic movement reached another milestone with Chinese technology: according to OBS figures, more than 11,000 hours of live Games footage were produced and distributed worldwide through Alibaba Cloud, and cloud-based broadcasting officially overtook satellite as the main transmission method for reaching billions of viewers. Then-OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos said the Games did not simply want to show off technology, but hoped advances would make people around the world truly fall in love with the athletes, the sport and the Olympics.
In Dakar, that same technology is helping Africa present a more vivid Olympic Games.
Green Credentials Behind the Cloud
The technology push also supports the Olympic commitment to green and sustainable Games. The future national cloud will help Senegal upgrade from paper to electronic visas, offering a more environmentally friendly option. Similar gains were already recorded at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, where the cloud data center ran on clean energy such as wind and solar and used AI to cut energy consumption by 70 percent compared with a traditional data center; OBS calculated the facility saves 80,000 tons of coal a year, equivalent to planting more than 4 million trees annually.
What Happens After the Closing Ceremony
When the Youth Games conclude, the dedicated cloud platform will be handed over in full to Senegal as its national cloud — the first time a Games cloud has been transferred wholesale into a national platform. Coventry said she hopes this first Olympic event in Africa and its many firsts bring more possibilities to the continent: “Today, Senegalese youth are welcoming one new opportunity after another, and these Youth Olympic Games are helping make that a reality.”
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