• For Day Zero at MWC 24, the Huawei Cloud Summit focused on offering customers AI-powered solutions under the theme of Accelerate Intelligence with Everything-as-a-Service.
• Huawei Cloud presented 10 AI-oriented industry solutions utilising the company’s Pangu models.
• Huawei Cloud now boasts 85 availability zones in 30 regions across 170-plus countries.

While Huawei has scaled back its consumer hardware focus at Mobile World Congress in recent years, the enterprise side of the business is one of the largest exhibitors at the week-long event. To kick off its MWC 24 with the Huawei Cloud Summit, where the AI-powered solutions that the company has been working formed the focus under the theme of Accelerated Intelligence-as-a-Service.

The company showcased 10 AI-oriented innovations during the Summit, all leveraging its Pangu large language models (LLMs).

“The objective is an AI-ready infrastructure tailored to each industry for a faster journey towards intelligence,” the company outlined.

“Intelligence will open up new opportunities for Europe in the next decade. We hope to use ICT to help global customers and partners unlock the full potential of intelligence. Together with so many friends in Europe, we believe we can better support the digital and intelligent transformation of industries,” remarked Jim Lu, president of the European Region and SVP of Huawei.

Further unpacking the capabilities of its foundation models, the company noted that they make AI a new engine for the growth of cloud computing. While the potential is vast, implementing AI in line with business objectives requires systematic innovation, it also stressed.

“Huawei Cloud will help you with two strategies. AI for Cloud uses AI and foundation models to elevate your experience. They revolutionize software development, digital content production, and more. Cloud for AI makes AI adoption seamless and efficient. Architectural innovation, AI-native storage, and data-AI convergence empower you to train and use AI like never before,” enthused Huawei Cloud CTO Bruno Zhang, in a release shared with Hypertext.

Some of the notable innovations shown off during the Summit include what Huawei terms the KooVerse, which leverages the network Huawei Cloud has created in recent years, with 85 availability zones in 30 regions (including South Africa) across 170-plus countries. This global cloud infrastructure covers compute, storage, networking, and security, to push latency down to 50 ms for customers wanting to spin up new solutions.

One of the other interesting offerings is AI Cloud Service, which supports trillion-parameter model training. Here training jobs can run uninterrupted on a cluster over thousands of cards for 30 days, 90 percent of the time, the company highlighted. Service downtime also stays within 10 minutes, as it provides over 100 Pangu model capability sets and 100 adapted open source large models out of the box.

On the more technical side of things, GaussDB is billed as a next-generation database featuring high availability, security, performance, flexibility, and intelligence.

“Specifically, its enterprise-class distributed architecture ensures high availability thanks to zero intra-city dual-cluster RPO, complete isolation of software and hardware faults, and zero service downtime. For security, it is certified CC EAL4+, the highest level in the industry. For automation, GaussDB enhances database migration, deployment, and migration as the world’s first AI-native database,” Huawei specified.

Lastly, for media infrastructure and in particular AI-generated content (AIGC) Huawei Cloud has built several industry-tailored solutions. These include, “Huawei Cloud MetaStudio, the content production pipeline that include Workspace and AIGC-based virtual humans, generates content more quickly and better.”

“For experience, Huawei Cloud Live, Low Latency Live, and SparkRTC empower more seamless live experiences. For evolution, Huawei Cloud provides AIGC and 3D space services with real-time user interaction. All these combine to boost the business and user experience to the next level,” the company continued.

With South Africa being a key region for Huawei Cloud, it will be interesting to see how its clear focus on AI will translate to offerings locally during the course of 2024, as well as how the other hyperscalers operating in South Africa will react.

[Images – Provided]