Huawei Cloud sees Asia-Pacific as a key market for its AI products

The cloud division of Huawei Technologies sees the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) as a potentially huge market for its AI solutions. As SCMP reports, the company’s cloud services in the region have grown 20-fold over the past four years despite American sanctions.

According to Huawei Cloud spokesperson Jacqueline Shi, the company’s next step in the region will be to provide comprehensive AI solutions. These include the Ascend Cloud cloud service, the ModelArts AI development platform, and Pangu, a large language model (LLM) developed by Huawei itself. The company is already working with a weather forecasting service in Thailand to implement Pangu, and is also working with other industries such as finance.

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The Asia-Pacific expansion plan demonstrates the company’s intention to diversify its cash flow and attract more international clients amid growing interest in generative AI solutions across many industries. The region is one of the company’s largest cloud computing markets and is where Huawei first launched some cloud products, such as DBaaS, before offering them globally, Shi said.

In May 2024, Huawei launched Egypt’s first public cloud service in Cairo, while simultaneously launching LLM for Arabic. Last September, Huawei launched a data center in the Saudi capital of Riyadh to provide the country and other countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia with public cloud services.

The company is now ranked as the second-largest cloud service provider in mainland China, behind only Alibaba Group’s cloud division, according to Canalys. According to Huawei reports, cloud computing has become one of the company’s strongest growth vectors in 2023, with revenue growing year-on-year by 21.9% to ¥55.29 billion ($7.6 billion).

The Ascend cloud AI platform is built on processors and frameworks developed by the company itself, this allows it to overcome American sanctions that limit China’s access to semiconductors and technologies of American origin. In mainland China, Huawei Ascend family chips now serve as an alternative to NVIDIA accelerators, the supply of which is limited in China.

These are not the only Huawei initiatives related to cloud solutions. The company recently introduced a network monitor that can quickly find even a single faulty chip in an entire data center, and recently information appeared that Huawei is preparing to release an AI accelerator Ascend 910C capable of competing with NVIDIA H100.