Huawei unveils Arabic LLM, new data centre in Egypt as part of revenue diversification strategy
- Huawei claimed its LLM’s automatic speech recognition capability has an accuracy rate of 96 per cent, enabling it to cover over 20 Arabic-speaking countries
- The company’s launch of the Arabic LLM and the cloud service in Egypt comes amid ongoing efforts by the US-sanctioned firm to attract overseas industrial clients
The Arabic LLM, a 100 billion parameter model based on Huawei’s self-developed Pangu, has been trained with local data to ensure “understanding of the local culture, history, knowledge customs and more of the Arab world”, the company’s cloud unit said in a statement on Tuesday.
Trained in modern standard Arabic, the LLM can enable enterprises to build their own AI model catering to different local languages in the Arabic speaking world, and for various industries such as banking and education, William Dong, president of Huawei Cloud’s marketing, said on the sidelines of the company’s Cloud Summit in Cairo.
Huawei said its LLM’s automatic speech recognition capability has an accuracy rate of 96 per cent, enabling it to cover over 20 Arabic-speaking countries. The model was also trained on industry data sets that covered digital power, oil and gas, and finance to support various sectors.
“We believe that every country should have AI capabilities to preserve [their] local culture and that AI models should be developed and trained with local languages, enabling vertical industries to become more efficient,” said Jacqueline Shi, president of global marketing and sales services at Huawei Cloud.
The Arabic LLM will be supported by the company’s new data centre launched on the same day in Cairo, which makes Huawei the first in the world to provide a public cloud service in Egypt, according to the company.
The new Cairo region, which will provide cloud services to 28 African countries including Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria, will mark Huawei’s 33rd cloud region globally.
