Huawei eyes Asia-Pacific growth with AI cloud services

Huawei is eyeing the Asia-Pacific as a prime market for its AI offerings, buoyed by the 20-fold expansion of its public cloud service in the region over the past four years despite US-led sanctions.

Jacqueline Shi, President of Global Marketing and Services at Huawei Cloud, announced at a Bangkok media briefing on August 15th: “For our next step in the region, we will continue to provide comprehensive AI solutions.” These include the Ascend Cloud Service, the ModelArts AI development platform, and Pangu, Huawei’s proprietary large language model that underpins generative AI services akin to ChatGPT.

The company is already collaborating with Thai weather forecasters to implement Pangu LLM and is partnering with various sectors, including finance, to enhance efficiency and reduce costs.

This AI-focused strategy for Asia-Pacific demonstrates Huawei’s efforts to diversify its revenue streams and attract more international clients amid growing demand for generative AI services across traditional industries. This comes even as the Shenzhen-based tech giant remains on the US government’s blacklist.

According to Shi, the Asia-Pacific region is one of Huawei’s largest markets for cloud computing services. It has served as a launchpad for certain cloud products, such as its “serverless database” solution, before wider international deployment.

Huawei’s global expansion continues, with the company launching Egypt’s first public cloud service in Cairo in May, along with an Arabic-language LLM. In September 2022, Huawei established a data centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to provide public cloud services for clients in the country and surrounding regions.

In mainland China, Huawei ranks as the second-largest cloud services provider, trailing only Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud unit, as per research firm Canalys. Notably, Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Cloud computing has emerged as one of Huawei’s strongest growth areas in 2023, with this division’s revenue surging 21.9% year-on-year to 55.29 billion yuan (US$7.6 billion), according to the company’s latest annual report.

Huawei’s AI solution is built on its self-developed processors and framework, allowing it to circumvent US sanctions that limit mainland China’s access to American-origin technologies like advanced semiconductors. In mainland China, Huawei’s Ascend AI chips now serve as an alternative to US-restricted graphics processing units from Nvidia.

(Photo by P. L.)

See also: Huawei’s upcoming chip may break China’s 7nm barrier

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Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, cloud, connectivity, huawei, telecoms