Huawei Cloud, with its end-to-end AI enablement stack powered by DeepSeek and DeepSeek R1 AI, is now available to end-users, and is seeing significant interest from South African organisations seeking to harness AI.
This is according to speakers at the Huawei Cloud Tech Wave DeepSeek workshop in Johannesburg this week.
Rex Lei, President of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, said: “Today, AI is changing everything. As an open source AI model, DeepSeek is growing at the speed of light. It achieved almost 100 million registered users in a very short time. With DeepSeek, countries and companies have the chance to build their own models.”
He noted that every year, Huawei invests at least 20% of yearly revenue in R&D, particularly into cloud, AI and related areas. Huawei Cloud always puts AI as the company's core strategy, and by transitioning from cloud-native to AI-native, Huawei Cloud leads the industry with non-stop innovation.
He pointed out that Huawei Cloud defines AI-native in two sectors. One is "AI for cloud", which means they reshape and upgrade all Huawei Cloud services into intelligent ones using AI. The other is "cloud for AI", where Huawei Cloud aims to build the best platform, including computing architecture, data, model tools and professional services, to accelerate the development of AI.
Roc Bai, VP of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, said DeepSeek is changing the AI landscape because it makes it easier to access LLMs, with its lower cost and lower compute requirements.
“Data is the oil of the 21st century, but how do you dig it out? It is particularly complex when 70% of data is unstructured, and organisations need to acquire it in real-time,” he said.
“Organisations need to be able to model data, build a data lake and have capabilities like batch streaming,” he said. “Several organisations often lack the necessary computing power to optimise AI. With Huawei Cloud best practice, full-stack AI capabilities, cost-effective models, AI data centre and DeepSeek, we can construct the enterprise smart brain and enable AI for South Africa,” Bai said.
Calvin Huang, Head of Solution Architecture for Huawei Cloud South Africa, outlined Huawei Cloud’s secure, stable and reliable AI cluster and efficient inference application. He highlighted three modes: DeepSeek R1 + RAG, R1 + prompt engineering and DeepSeek model fine-tuning for optimised inference performance. “South Africa has the vision to become an AI hub for Africa, and Huawei Cloud can turn the ‘what if’ to the ‘what’s next’. Huawei Cloud is the only cloud that can enable end-to-end AI – secure, scalable and lightning fast,” he said.
Lunga Zonke, Chief Technology Officer at Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, elaborated on Huawei Cloud retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which enables organisations to retrieve and manage their own data within one vector database and framework, and tools such as MetaStudio with one-click integration with DeepSeek, for avatar and audio content generation, and ChatBI natural language to SQL generation.
Zonke also highlighted customer success stories including SiliconFlow, a Chinese start-up which benefited from the cost-effectiveness of Huawei Cloud AI Services; SiliconStorm, a Chinese AGI company that slashed its resource requirement by 50% in the Huawei Cloud; and China Travel International, which improved its user engagement with a ranking model built using Huawei Cloud and DeepSeek.
For more information on AI solutions, log onto: https://www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/s/JUFJJQ.
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