Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud global marketing and sales service.
MWC25 Barcelona: Huawei Cloud aims to expedite the cloud services evolution from cloud-native to artificial intelligence (AI)-native.
This, as the company revealed that Huawei Cloud expanded by over 50% in 2024, outside of the Chinese mainland, becoming a “preferred partner” for numerous organisations.
This came to light at the Huawei Cloud Summit, hosted ahead of MWC Barcelona 2025, formerly Mobile World Congress Barcelona.
Huawei is among the many vendors that are this week showcasing their technologies and solutions at the GSM Association-run flagship mobile connectivity conference.
According to Huawei, countries and companies are identifying AI as a core strategy and have the chance to build their own models.
It further notes that AI models can be optimised by leveraging the open-source community’s achievements in this area. Data, especially high-quality data, plays a more and more important role in making AI a reality.
Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud global marketing and sales service, said AI has been positioned as the company’s core strategy.
Shi explained that Huawei Cloud defines AI-native in two sectors. The first is “AI for cloud”, which means reshaping and upgrading all Huawei Cloud services into intelligent ones using AI.
The second is “cloud for AI”, where Huawei Cloud aims to build the best platform − including compute architecture, data, model tools and professional services − to accelerate the development of AI.
Shi noted Huawei Cloud is determined to upgrade its cloud services and solutions to satisfy the requirements of customers in all industries, helping them accelerate intelligence.
“In this AI era, the foundation of achieving AI-native lies in being cloud-native,” said Bruno Zhang, CTO of Huawei Cloud.
“Over the past few years, Huawei Cloud has focused on assisting businesses in effectively going to, using and managing cloud through cloud-native means.
“Building upon this foundation, Huawei Cloud is now advancing towards the next stages: constructing AI-native infrastructure, such as CloudMatrix and an AI cloud service; developing AI-native cloud services, including databases, knowledge lakes and a software development pipeline; and offering AI models and tools for customers and partners to better train and run their AI models.”
Countries, including South Africa, have witnessed increased adoption of cloud technologies by businesses across various industries, driven by the need for agility, scalability and cost optimisation in an increasingly digital landscape.
According to the Africa Analysis 2024 South Africa Cloud Computing Market Growth Report, SA’s cloud market is expected to surge to over R113 billion by 2028, up from R35 billion last year.
Huawei Cloud has invested in data centres over the past five years and deployed three availability zones in Johannesburg.
The Huawei Cloud summit was hosted under the theme: “Accelerate intelligence, amplify success”. It brought together industry players, customers and Huawei partners, such as TravelgateX, Telkom Indonesia and Turkish e-commerce player Hepsiburada.
According to Fajrin Rasyid, chief digital innovation officer of Telkom Indonesia, the company has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with Huawei on data centres, cloud services, digital technologies and big data, to transform into a digital carrier.
Mustafa Kemal Erișen, IT head of Hepsiburada, said the organisation has seen “significant” improvements after migrating its search service to Huawei Cloud, achieving a 50-fold increase in platform throughput, 95% reduction in service response time and 150% boost in bandwidth usage.
