Huawei’s cloud services unit sees Asia-Pacific as a vast market for AI products

The cloud computing unit of Huawei Technologies sees Asia-Pacific as a potentially vast market for its artificial intelligence (AI) products, on the back of the 20-fold growth of its public cloud service in the region over the past four years in spite of US-led sanctions.

“For the [company’s] next step in the region, we will continue to provide comprehensive AI solutions,” Jacqueline Shi, president of global marketing and services at Huawei Cloud, said at a media briefing in Bangkok on Thursday.

Those solutions include Ascend Cloud Service, one-stop AI development platform ModelArts and its self-developed large language model (LLM) – the technology underpinning generative AI (GenAI) services like ChatGPT – called Pangu.

Huawei is already working with weather forecasters in Thailand to adopt Pangu LLM, while also collaborating with various industries such as finance to improve efficiency and reduce costs, according to Shi.

The AI expansion plan for Asia-Pacific shows Huawei’s efforts to diversify its revenue stream and woo more overseas clients amid the rising demand for GenAI services across many traditional industries, even as the Shenzhen-based company remains blacklisted by the US government.