Africa: Huawei Cloud Goes Live in Egypt

Huawei Cloud becomes world’s first company to open a public cloud in Egypt, Industry AI accelerates digitization in Egypt and in Northern Africa region

[May 22, 2024, Cairo] Huawei launched a Cloud Region in Egypt on Tuesday, May 21, making it the first company to establish a public Cloud in Northern Africa region. The Cairo Region will bring Huawei Cloud’s intelligent and innovative capabilities and serve as a hub for countries in the region.

The announcement, made at the Huawei Cloud Summit 2024 in Cairo on Tuesday, adds to Huawei Cloud’s global presence of 93 availability zones across 33 regions.

Speaking at the summit, Jacqueline SHI, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing & Sales Service, said Huawei Cloud will bring its capabilities such as artificial intelligence, Arabic large language models, and databases for Egypt’s 2030 Vision. “From today, everyone can start the digitization journey on Huawei cloud. With our unique chip capabilities, AI computing framework and training platform, we believe we can help the country build its data sovereignty and own large language models that are essential to protecting and passing on the country’s history, culture, and knowledge.”, she said. Huawei Cloud also announced its new Arabic LLM, an important step in supporting companies in the region with the digital transformation of vertical industries. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) service supports functions covering over 20 Arabic-speaking countries, with an accuracy rate reaching 96%.

“This Arabic LLM is newly introduced to Egypt, however Huawei’s Pangu model has already been adopted in real-life use cases in China and other regions. For example, the AI model is assisting judges in analyzing court recordings and helping doctors verify their prescriptions”, added Colin HU, President of Enterprise & Cloud Business, Huawei Northern Africa, sharing the evolution of use cases for Huawei cloud’s artificial intelligence capabilities and its large language models.

“We gather our global experiences in digital transformation on Huawei Cloud” Jacqueline SHI addressed.“When we combine industry know-how with technology, that’s the way to truly help industry make the most of the Cloud. This is a shared mindset of our team. We believe each industry should have its own specific LLMs.”Currently, Huawei Cloud serves over 500 financial customers, 800 e-government projects, 120 carriers, and the top 30 automakers worldwide.

Mark CHEN, President of Huawei Cloud’s Global Solution Sales Department, unveiled the CHANGE architecture after the launch. The architecture features a “new cloud native infrastructure”, a “comprehensive cloud technology platform (AI)”, “leading solutions for the various industry scenarios“, “efficient and comprehensive professional services” and “expert consulting services”, which can provide better, more efficient and valuable services for customers in finance, government affairs, e-commerce, media, and various other industries.

“We believe this is the best practice architecture for digital transformation today. Digital transformation is a complex systematic project, and enterprises need to respond to industry transformation and upgrading challenges with systematic thinking and innovative architectures,” Mark CHEN said.

Huawei announced that it will invest US$300 million over five years to establish the first public cloud region in Egypt, offering over 200 cloud services including AI platforms, data platforms, and development platforms. To nurture a thriving ecosystem, Huawei will support 200 local software partners, to empower 1,300 channel partners, and eventually to build a prosperous local software and application ecosystem. For the next five years, Huawei will train 10,000 local developers and educate 100,000 digital professionals in the region, to drive intelligent transformation.

To further accelerate ecosystem development, Huawei Cloud announced upgrades to its startup program in Egypt, including an advanced cloud platform, training programs, and business resources. The Huawei Cloud Startup Program assigns dedicated teams to advise on startups’ cloud adoption and subsidizes their cloud consumption. A single startup can apply for cloud credits worth up to $150,000.