Huawei Cloud evolves to cloud ‘for everyone’

HUAWEI CLOUD Releases Pangu 3.0

Shaping the Future beyond Chatbots: Huawei focuses on AI's Impact on Industry Transformation

DONGGUAN, China, July 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei is bringing forth new industry opportunities and technological advancements driven by the AI wave. During his keynote speech at Huawei's Developer Conference, Zhang Ping'an, Huawei Executive Director and CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, unveiled the Pangu Model 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services. These innovations aim to empower industry customers and partners and unlock the potential of artificial intelligence for transformative growth across a range of sectors.

Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient."

Pangu Models 3.0 is a system of pre-trained models that can be quickly adapted to meet scenario-specific needs and address complex challenges across multiple industries. By leveraging large-scale data sets and machine learning algorithms, Pangu 3.0 is set to revolutionize the industrial application of AI in diverse areas such as weather forecasting, drug development, fault identification in trains, and the mining industry.

Mr. Zhang said: "Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant, making them more productive and efficient. We will uphold our mission of "AI for Industries", and use Pangu models to reshape all industries with AI."

Prestigious science journal Nature recently published a paper describing the enormous potential that artificial intelligence holds for weather prediction. The paper described how Huawei's Pangu Weather AI Model team developed a precise and accurate global AI weather forecast system based on deep learning using 43 years of data.

Pangu Weather is the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional numerical weather forecast methods. The model allows a 10,000x improvement in prediction speed, reducing global weather prediction time to just seconds. The model focuses on key elements and common time ranges, allowing for more precise weather forecasts. Notably, it has accurately predicted the trajectories and landing times of typhoons, including the recent Typhoon Mawar in May this year, demonstrating its exceptional capabilities.

On July 18, Huawei and Shandong Energy Group will jointly launch the first commercial case of Pangu Mining Model in Jinan, Shandong province. It is a ground-breaking solution that will enhance safety, efficiency, and productivity. Traditional mining operations are inherently risky, requiring extensive manpower and posing significant technical and safety challenges. However, with the implementation of digital technologies, augmented by the Pangu Mining Model, the industry is witnessing a transformative shift. By importing massive amounts of data for model pre-training, the Pangu Mining Model enables unsupervised self-learning, covering over 300 core scenarios in coal mining operations. From digging and drivage to machinery, transport, and communication, the model streamlines AI applications in numerous coal mining scenarios.

Transportation system failures in coal mines are a significant issue, resulting in decreased coal output and financial losses. Addressing this challenge, Huawei's Pangu Mining Model incorporates an AI-based intelligent monitoring system that accurately identifies exceptions in the transportation system, such as large coal blocks and anchors, with an exceptional accuracy rate of up to 98%.

The railway industry also benefits immensely from Huawei's AI advancements. Through the implementation of the Pangu Railway Model, the safety and efficiency of freight trains are significantly improved. Previous fault identification processes within Train Freight Detection Systems (TFDS) have been labour-intensive, inefficient, and costly. On railways, the Pangu Railway Model can accurately identify 67 types of freight cars and over 430 types of faults found on railways and freight cars. It can quickly scan millions of images captured by the railway TFDS system and filter out 95% of the images that are fault-free. This way, train inspectors can focus on the remaining images, and this helps them improve both efficiency and accuracy.

These case studies exemplify the transformative power of AI in industrial applications. By harnessing the capabilities of Huawei's Pangu 3.0 and Ascend AI cloud services, businesses can unlock new levels of safety, efficiency, and productivity, driving substantial growth and competitive advantage in their respective industries. Huawei's commitment to innovation and the development of advanced AI solutions underscores its commitment to providing cutting edge solutions for customers. 

Huawei Cloud evolves to cloud ‘for everyone’

Jay Zhou, Managing Director of Huawei Cloud.

Huawei Cloud is stepping up its focus on innovation as a value proposition to enhance its standing as a cloud for everyone. This emerged at Huawei Eco-Connect Sub-Saharan Africa 2023, in Sandton, where Jay Zhou, MD of Huawei Cloud South Africa, outlined how Huawei Cloud underpins key industries’ transformation and growth.

Zhou said: “In the ICT industry, the cloud is still the future of ICT and the foundation of digital transformation. What has changed over the past year is that more applications are now going to the cloud, including virtual reality, automation and warehousing.

He highlighted Huawei Cloud’s growth over the past year: “Globally, we have increased our global regions, with two new regions in Ireland and Turkey. We increased our global availability zones, which includes the new zone launched in Johannesburg last year,” he said. Huawei Cloud now has 2 800 content delivery nodes (CDNs) – including the new Cape Town CDN, which went online during the first week in July.

Huawei Cloud’s global revenue almost doubled last year, with a more than 40% increase in the number of partners and over 55% increase in the number of developers. Huawei has yet again increased investment in R&D, allocating 25.1% of its total annual revenue in 2022 to R&D. At the end of 2022, over 114 000+ employees, or 55.4% of its workforce, worked in R&D.

“Last year, we spent around USD25 billion on new technologies, new data centres. This is important because this is the reason we can keep innovating in this industry,” he said.

Zhou highlighted Huawei’s own ERP system as an example of the innovation and progress made in the company. “In the past, Huawei’s Oracle ERP system was a very complicated ERP system. It reached its performance limits and couldn’t be expanded. To generate a report on fulfilment would take us around 90 minutes. To overcome these challenges, Huawei decided to develop our own ERP system – MetaERP – and GaussDB distributed relational database. This reduced our reporting time from 90 minutes to 15 seconds, and fulfilment report time from 23 minutes to nine seconds.

“Huawei needed to give the world another choice in ERP, so we will launch this product to market in the near future,” Zhou said.

“In South Africa, we have seen an overall increase and growth across business KPIs – revenue, customer base and number of partners. Our services have also increased in South Africa. A Gartner report released in April this year stated that Huawei Cloud SA is already number three in infrastructure as a service – this is a big milestone for Huawei Cloud, achieved with the support of customers and partners.”

“We remain humble because we still have a long way to go. Some things we won’t change – our position, slogan and value propositions, including our outstanding technology, support levels and value propositions such as training won’t change. However, we are adding innovation to the value we create. Innovation is leading us to the future,” he said.

“We cover all key industries including fintech, e-commerce, education, media and government. My aim is to build a cloud for everyone, in this market, which is affordable, trusted and innovative,” he said. “We can assist organisations even if they have limited budget or technical capabilities, or they need a partner to develop new solutions with them.”

Huawei’s AI innovations are making waves across sectors, such as its Pangu-Weather AI model, the first AI prediction model to demonstrate higher precision than traditional numerical weather forecast methods. Nature, one of the world's top scientific journals, recently published a paper describing how to develop a precise and accurate global AI weather forecast system based on deep learning using 43 years of data. In scientific trials, the Pangu-Weather model was found to accurately predict in seconds fine-grained meteorological features, including humidity, wind speed, temperature and sea level pressure.

“In government, a very traditional sector, I strongly believe hybrid cloud is the future because of data privacy concerns. Hybrid clouds can provide flexibility to the government. You can select which data to keep in your own data centre, and which data should go to the cloud. Huawei is the only provider that can do both, so we have a huge advantage in the hybrid cloud area,” he said. “We unify the architecture to enable customers to have a unified experience. We already provide a private cloud to SITA and are now busy with the public cloud.”

In education, online education is the future, and it depends on the cloud, he noted. “Concurrency is an important factor in this sector. In a test with Unisa, we reached 30 000 concurrent users writing exams at the same time – a record in South Africa. At UNIZULU, we provided a unique AI anti-cheating system.”

In the media sector, Zhou said Huawei Cloud’s E-cubed model (efficiency, experience and evolution) was driving growth and innovation. Huawei Cloud’s media innovations include rendering farms and high definition, low bitrate technologies to reduce latency in live broadcasts.

In finance and e-commerce, Huawei Cloud works with leading enterprises globally and across Africa to help them scale, overcome challenges and move into new markets.

Huawei helps e-commerce businesses overcome challenges such as flexibility, cost and future-proofing through scalable and secure infrastructure, transparent pricing and in-country support. For fintechs, Huawei Cloud enables scale and profitability, customer acquisition and robust governance, compliance and security across multiple countries.

“My aim is to bring our global innovations as well as global and local support to South Africa, to build a cloud for everyone – all enterprises, SMEs and enterprises in this country,” Zhou concluded.