The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

Beijing, NUO Hotel, second-floor banquet hall.

The champagne tower was stacked six tiers high, with golden liquid flowing down the crystal glasses like some kind of extravagant waterfall.

The air was filled with the scents of expensive women's perfumes, the aroma of roasted Wagyu beef fat, and the intoxicatingly hot atmosphere characteristic of Vanity Fair.

This is a celebration banquet for Weiguang Cloud.

Or rather, it's a "paying homage" event for the entire live streaming industry.

Chen Shaojie from Douyu, Wang Sicong from Panda TV, Feng Yousheng from Inke... These big shots who usually fight tooth and nail for streamers are now raising their glasses, surrounding a young man, with reserved yet eager smiles on their faces.

That young man was Shen Nan.

He was wearing a newly custom-made Armani suit, well-tailored but slightly tight, forcing him to constantly pull in his stomach. He held a wine glass in his hand, his smile somewhat stiff.

"Mr. Shen, we need to discuss the bandwidth for next quarter in detail."

"Mr. Shen, I heard your company is working on AI recognition? Could you provide us with an API connection?"

"President Shen, why hasn't President Lin arrived yet? Everyone's waiting to toast him."

Shen Nan wiped the sweat from his forehead and repeated the excuse for the tenth time:

"Mr. Lin is not feeling well and will not be attending tonight. Everyone, please enjoy your drinks and have fun."

A sigh of regret rippled through the crowd, but no one dared to express their dissatisfaction.

The current glimmer of light is like a Damocles' sword hanging over their heads.

If anyone dares to offend "General Manager Lin," who is said to have an eccentric personality and lives a secluded life, their own server might inexplicably "shudder" tomorrow.

In the live streaming industry, lag is a death sentence.

In a corner of the banquet hall, several financial reporters were talking in hushed tones.

"That's incredibly arrogant," a young reporter clicked his tongue. "Even Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) might not dare to miss such a big event, and this Lin Che actually dares to stand up the entire industry?"

"They have the right to be arrogant."

A seasoned journalist took a sip of red wine, his gaze fixed on the center of the hall with a complex expression.

"The current live streaming industry appears to be a diverse and vibrant field, but in reality, it's an arena where platforms like Douyu, Panda, and Yingke are the gladiators."

"And Lin Che."

The old reporter pointed to the ceiling.

"He was the emperor who sat in the stands and charged admission fees regardless of who won or lost."

"The Invisible Emperor"

……

……

Just as the noise in the banquet hall reached its peak.

The building has three underground levels, which are used for parking.

A black Audi A8 silently glided over the speed bump.

The car windows were tightly closed, cutting off all outside noise.

Lin Che sat in the back seat, holding a tablet computer. The screen didn't display bank account balances or live footage of the banquet hall, but rather lines of dry, rapidly scrolling log code.

"Boss, aren't you going up there and show your face?"

Wang Jian, who was driving, glanced at the rearview mirror. He had changed out of his signature plaid shirt and put on an oddly shaped suit jacket, making him look somewhat awkward.

"There's no need."

Lin Che didn't even look up, his fingers swiping across the screen as if he were inspecting an army.

"They don't worship me, they worship computing power."

"As long as our GPUs are still running, and as long as our latency is 10 milliseconds lower than Tencent Cloud's, even if I were a dog, they would line up to feed me bones."

Wang Jian smiled, a smile typical of technical personnel, tinged with a touch of geek superiority.

"Tencent has made a move."

"After returning to Shenzhen, Zhang Zhidong immediately established the 'Audio and Video Lab.' It is said that a budget of 200 million yuan was approved to thoroughly master the H.265 algorithm."

"It's too late."

Lin Che closed the tablet and tossed it aside.

"Technology has a window of opportunity."

"While they were still figuring out how to compress the video to make it smaller, we had already obtained something more valuable than gold."

"Go to the lab."

……

……

Microlight Cloud Beijing R&D Center.

This place is located on the second basement floor of an office building in Zhongguancun. There are no windows, no champagne, only dozens of rows of server racks emitting a monotonous and hypnotic hum.

The air was filled with the smell of ozone and instant coffee.

Lin Che pushed open the heavy iron door marked "Computer Room - Important Location".

On the massive data monitoring wall, instead of the traffic curve of the live streaming platform, there is a progress bar called [Project Alpha].

Current Status: Training (Epoch 720/10000)

Dataset: 450 PB (Petabytes)

Learning Rate: 0.001

"Four hundred and fifty PB".

Lin Che looked at the number, and a hint of greed finally appeared in his eyes.

That's not ordinary video data.

That's the behavioral logs, bullet screen interactions, and massive amounts of high-definition facial and motion capture data generated by hundreds of millions of netizens across China watching live streams over the past month.

For ordinary people, this is just entertainment.

But for AI, this is fodder.

The finest feed.

"Boss, I don't understand."

Wang Jian walked to the console and brought up a complex neural network architecture diagram.

"Why are we collecting this? Although this data can be used to optimize video encoding and make the picture clearer... the amount of data is just too huge. Our storage costs are exploding."

"What do you think we're doing?" Lin Che asked in return.

"Should we provide CDN or cloud services?"

Wang Jian was taken aback. Isn't this exactly what Weiguang Cloud's main business is now? Selling bandwidth and acceleration services, making a fortune.

"Wang Jian, you have a good memory."

Lin Che walked up to a server, reached out and touched its cold black metal casing, feeling the vibration of the high-speed fan inside.

"Do you remember what you said when I asked you to buy a GPU six months ago?"

"You said it was used for mining."

Wang Jian nodded: "We did indeed dig it up later and even made our first fortune. Later on, we used it for video rendering and crushed Tencent Cloud."

"That's just a side business for GPUs."

Lin Che turned around, his gaze sharp.

"The CPU is the manager; it simply executes instructions step by step. It can calculate 1 plus 1 equals 2 very quickly."

"But the GPU is the brain."

"It has thousands of cores, it can process tens of thousands of images at the same time, it can...think."

Lin Che pointed to the constantly flashing neuron nodes on the screen.

"These live stream data contain the logic behind human facial expressions, language, emotions, and even micro-expressions."

"What we are training is not a video compression software."

"It's a pair of eyes."