Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is advancing quickly, but building and improving foundation models remains costly and complex for companies and developers. For this reason, Huawei Cloud’s Model as a Service (MaaS) solution has been created to deliver ready-to-use models tailored for AI Compute Service.
Huawei Cloud MaaS simplifies AI adoption for developers by offering on-demand, pay-per-token access to major foundation models without requiring heavy upfront investments in infrastructure. Furthermore, it acts as a full-stack development engine that speeds up coding, training and model deployment.
In other words, MaaS removes obstacles to using foundation models and delivers adaptable and affordable solutions for tasks like text generation, intelligent interactions and data processing.
This technology, aimed at allowing businesses to easily incorporate advanced AI features into their products and workflows, and helping developers to speed up innovation and boost competitive advantage, was recently introduced to key local developers in a deep dive workshop held at the Huawei Office Park in Johannesburg recently.
The workshop successfully attracted over 60 enterprise developers, including key customers and core ecosystem partners, such as Vodacom, SITA, Inzalo and Altron.
“In today’s world, AI is having a profound impact on development behaviours and product paradigms. Therefore, we are excited to launch our MaaS programme, allowing developers access to this technology at low cost. Ultimately, we hope to transform developer workflows by enabling them to unlock MaaS through our token ecosystem,” says Steven Chen, CEO at Huawei Cloud South Africa.
Most AI models are iterating rapidly and becoming increasingly powerful, notes Calvin Huang, Director of Cloud Solution Sales at Huawei Cloud South Africa. The difference is that Chinese open source (OS) models are emphasising engineering efficiency, while reducing resource consumption and costs – this is enabling them to rapidly close the gap with the leading closed source models like ChatGPT and Gemini.
“With an open ecosystem, you can have quick access to high quality OS models, which offer much lower pricing – our model’s cost is more than tenfold better than closed source solutions – while the model capabilities still meet enterprise needs. We can offer a full OS model portfolio, including Deepseek, GLM, Qwen and more,” he states.
In what could be described as a hardcore performance showcase, Huang presented the MaaS solution and demonstrated its differentiated advantages through live benchmark/performance comparisons, using typical scenarios.
“Huawei Cloud’s OS model also emphasises engineering efficiency, while reducing resource consumption and costs. Therefore, it is no surprise to learn that the gap between Chinese open source models and leading closed source models has been reduced from over a year to less than two months. Furthermore, some 61% of tokens on the OpenRouter platform come from Chinese open source models.”
He adds that crucially, user data is never used for model training or optimisation, and all data is deleted immediately upon service completion.
“MaaS also provides for frictionless OpenAI-compatible onboarding – so developers don’t need to rewrite their whole coding stack in order to integrate their work with our top tier large language models (LLMs).
“This makes it a simple matter for developers to switch from a closed source model to Huawei’s OS model in as little as five minutes – while still cutting up to 60% of their costs.”
To further prove how Huawei Cloud MaaS can automate complex multi-agent tasks, Huawei’s Cloud Solution Architect, Lerato Kekana, undertook a live demo session, delivering a deep-dive analysis of the OpenClaw technical architecture, demonstrating how to quickly deploy OpenClaw using MaaS. With MaaS, Huawei Cloud brings to the table the localisation of token AI. In fact, since launching MaaS in South Africa, the Huawei team has been actively engaging with the local developer community through various circle events – such as the Vodafone Summit, FNB Code Fest and various developer competitions – to gather real feedback and optimise local token service capabilities. The response from the developer community so far has proven to be overwhelmingly positive.
Huang adds that this is unsurprising, as Huawei Cloud’s MaaS offering will do more than simply work more capably – it will ultimately enable developers to utilise these tools to improve their own efficiencies.
“LLMs today are ideal for aspects like boilerplate and repetitive coding, natural language interfaces, content generation at scale, data transformation and extraction, prototyping and minimum viable product (MVP) development, as well as debugging and troubleshooting.
“So what is the role for developers in this AI-driven future? It is vital that developers today focus on high-value, human-centric work; raising the bar on skills; human-AI collaboration; owning quality, trust and accountability; building unique IP and domains; and, ultimately, on advocating and shaping the future,” he concludes.
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