Huawei’s cloud unit banks on booming AI demand with global footprint expansion in Europe and Middle East

Huawei’s cloud unit banks on booming AI demand with global footprint expansion in Europe and Middle East

26 Feb Huawei’s cloud unit banks on booming AI demand with global footprint expansion in Europe and Middle East

Posted at 06:00h in Asia by

The cloud unit of Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei Technologies is wooing overseas industry clients and expanding its global footprint with new data centres, banking on the explosive demand for generative artificial intelligence (AI), despite US sanctions.

Huawei is planning to open a new local cloud service in Egypt next month, adding to its 85 availability zones across 30 regions globally, according to executives at the company’s cloud summit in Barcelona on Sunday, ahead of the MWC smartphone and telecommunications show formerly called Mobile World Congress that started on Monday. It will also soon launch its first AI cloud computing centre in Hong Kong, the executives said.

“At Huawei Cloud, AI is a key strategy,” said Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service. “We’re building a solid cloud foundation for everyone, for every industry, to accelerate intelligence.”

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While the popularity of ChatGPT-like services led many Chinese companies to race to put out their own many large language models (LLMs), Huawei has stressed that its own Pangu AI model will focus on industrial use, which is the core of its AI strategy. Last July, Huawei unveiled the 3.0 version of Pangu, joining a cutthroat competition in China. Huawei has pushed for the use of its own model in sectors such as coal mining and railways, among others.

Huawei’s expansion in cloud computing has formed part of its ongoing efforts to forge deeper ties with traditional industries and corporations as it seeks to diversify revenue streams. The US has put multiple sanctions on the company since 2019, when its placement on Washington’s Entity List cut it off from critical American technologies, all but killing its lucrative global smartphone business.

Huawei’s cloud sales reached 45.3 billion yuan in 2022, after seeing rapid growth outside China, according to the company. Its cloud business saw steady growth last year, according to a new year’s message by Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu Houkun in December.

Huawei is the second-largest cloud service provider in China, according to Canalys, and it has been steadily expanding its global footprint. Last year it opened new data centres in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Ken Hu Houkun, Huawei’s rotating chairman. Photo: Huawei

At the opening ceremony last September for the data centre in Riyadh, Huawei promised to support 200,000 new developers in Saudi Arabia, and work with 1,000 local partners and 2,000 start-ups through its cloud computing services over the next five years.

The company also saw the number of its cloud partners in Europe quintuple last year. It pledged to support the growth of 1,000 European start-ups through cloud services in the next five years.

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