Huawei Cloud has reaffirmed its commitment to enabling digital transformation in Africa, with its significant investments made into R&D, AI enablement, local availability zones and local technical support and skills development.
This emerged during the Huawei South Africa Connect Summit 2025 in Sandton, where Huawei Cloud South Africa showcased its next-generation cloud and AI capabilities to over 4 000 delegates from across all sections of industries.
An AI-focused session at the Huawei Cloud Forum, themed ‘accelerate intelligence, amplify success’ deep dived into Huawei’s AI innovations and new Huawei Cloud Stack capabilities.
Changing the game for business in Africa
Describing AI as a game-changer, Rex Lei, President of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, said the technology would give South Africa new capabilities and boost the country’s competitiveness.
“Huawei Cloud hopes to be part of this journey,” he said. “AI technologies and applications are advancing rapidly in all sectors in China, and with Huawei Cloud's full-stack AI innovations and technologies, we are eager to share our technology, expertise and China’s successful best practices to help accelerate South Africa’s fourth industrial revolution.
“AI is a core strategy for Huawei Cloud, and we have invested in the full suite of AI capabilities and an extensive partner network to bring cutting-edge AI innovation from China to South Africa. We want to join hands with South Africa’s AI pioneers to accelerate artificial intelligence in South Africa,” he said.
Steven Chen, Managing Director of Huawei Cloud South Africa, emphasised Huawei Cloud's mission to empower local economic growth and talent development.
He noted: “Huawei Cloud is South Africa’s fastest-growing cloud provider. We were the first hyperscaler to launch a data centre in South Africa in 2018, and since then we have recorded 125% year-on-year growth and been the only hyperscaler with zero downtime in the past six years. Huawei Cloud now works with scores of blue-chip South African enterprises in South Africa.”
He said Huawei Cloud was an international powerhouse with 33 regions and 96 availability zones – three of them in South Africa. Its ever-expanding cloud services portfolio includes over 240 products, including innovations such as Pangu Model 5.5, GaussDB and the Huawei Cloud Stack.
Industry-specific intelligent acceleration
Showcasing the newly released Pangu 5.5 platform with industry-specific Pangu models, Li Yin, Chief Technology Officer of Huawei Cloud Pangu Model in HQ, China, said: “Enterprises are actively embracing AI, with investment increasing fourfold last year, compared to 2023.”
She noted: “Data quality is crucial to train AI. Huawei’s Pangu Model combines expert industry knowledge and AI capabilities to train powerful models for over 500 scenarios in more than 30 industries.”
Li highlighted Pangu’s enhanced NLP, multi-modal, prediction, computer vision and scientific models, as well as the new Pangu World Model based on the Pangu Multimodal Model, which generates digital physical spaces for training driving and embodied AI robots. Pangu Models aim to help customers build their own models to accelerate intelligent transformation across industries.
Huawei Cloud’s AI-native cloud empowers businesses to fully harness AI, while GaussDB Doer empowers enterprises to develop their own Database Administrator (DBA) capabilities; MetaStudio revolutionises virtual human creation; and Model Application Firewall (MAF) fortifies model inference security by preventing prompt injections and detecting non-compliant content in real-time.
AI-native infrastructure for enterprise transformation
Lunga Zonke, Chief Technology Officer of Huawei Cloud Sub-Saharan Africa, showcased Huawei Cloud’s AI native infrastructure to support enterprise transformation.
“Cloud native infrastructure is all about speed and agility, whereas AI native takes cloud native a step further. It’s all about the infrastructure we need to set up in order to embrace AI. The first thing we need to do is transform the data centre – traditional data centres were never built for AI workloads. Huawei Cloud native data centres are the foundation for rolling out full stack AI, with the compute, storage and networking to support high performance computing and training, elasticity and scalability organisations need.”
Resilience is key for AI native environments, so Huawei Cloud makes resilience faster and smarter, with cloud native backup with built-in business continuity and automatic failover, he said.
He noted: “Huawei Cloud’s Cloud Matrix supernode concept helps with resource pooling and automatically allocated resources to ensure the right type of compute is allocated for AI training and inference workloads. A number of services are built on top of it, and our overarching Model-as-a-Service gives customers access to a number of pre-trained models needed to harness AI.
“A lot of AI happens at the edge – for example, in self-driving cars. So, Huawei Cloud extends the AI native supernode concept to the edge to enable innovative use cases,” Zonke said. “A key priority is security, and Huawei Cloud builds it into everything we do with our comprehensive 1+4+7 security framework.
“Also important are AI native databases. Our databases are built to be AI native from the ground up, with full stack intelligence and automation at the core, as well as an intelligent kernel engine, intelligent development assistant and intelligent O&M assistant.”
Huawei Cloud Stack for enterprise acceleration
Keagan Boshoff, Senior Sales Manager of Huawei Cloud South Africa, noted that China was renowned for engineering and manufacturing high precision technology. “At the peak of this nation’s technological output, there is one name that stands well above the others – Huawei, a global leader in infrastructure, telecommunications and enterprise innovation. We build our own data centres, design our own software, we own our entire stack from silicon to services,” he said. “So, when the engineers and architects of AI-powered smart cities, global telecoms and national infrastructure turn their full force and attention to building a cloud, you get Huawei Cloud Stack.”
He outlined the capabilities of the Huawei Cloud Stack, which brings the capabilities of the Huawei Cloud to on-premises environments. “It’s the Huawei Cloud without any compromise, giving organisations all the features, integration and security, with on-premises control,” he said.
Boshoff said Huawei Cloud Stack already supports over 800 government departments and over 300 major financial institutions in China, and with over 30 national customers in sub-Saharan Africa.
Huawei Cloud enables partner success
The Forum also featured Huawei Cloud partners such as IoT.nxt and Any Technology, which harness Huawei Cloud technology to underpin their businesses.
Lazo Karapanagiotides, CEO of IoT.nxt, said the partnership was delivering cost savings, scalability, enhanced performance and low latency.
Debbie Wong, Vice-President of Commercials at Any Technology, highlighted the international financial card management specialist’s ability to help banks reduce IT costs, harness AI and scale by using Huawei Cloud and GaussDB.
Building transformative developer ecosystems
Li Xingcheng, Director of Huawei Cloud Developer Ecosystem Overseas Markets, said Huawei Cloud’s developer ecosystem had over 8 million members and 45 000 partners globally. “Our mission is to build a unified developer platform and provide the best content, community and code for our developers,” he said, highlighting Huawei Cloud’s continuous investment in developer technical support, developer communities as well as dedicated developer programs. Huawei Cloud will build a diverse ecosystem where developers thrive together.
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