Business News sponsored by Vodacom Transformation of Work:

This year's Huawei Cloud Summit demonstrated how Huawei Cloud is the infrastructure of choice for AI applications. With the theme of "Accelerate Intelligence with Everything as a Service", the 500-strong event brought together executives and experts from diverse industries, such as carrier, finance, and Internet. Huawei Cloud presented 10 AI-oriented innovations and extensive industry expertise of Pangu models. The objective is an AI-ready infrastructure tailored to each industry for a faster journey towards intelligence.

Jim Lu, President of the European Region and Senior Vice President of Huawei, stated in his speech that, "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."

Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, said in her speech: " Huawei Cloud is one of the fastest growing cloud service providers in the world. At Huawei Cloud, we're all about pushing boundaries and bringing cutting-edge tech to customers around the world. We have launched a series of local cloud Regions in recent years, such as in Ireland, Türkiye, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, giving customers easy access to the best-performing cloud. With over 120 security certifications worldwide, you can be sure your business and data are safe and sound. But it is not just about the tech. We believe in helping our partners grow alongside us, and this goal is now backed by our GoCloud and GrowCloud programs. And let's not forget AI – it is reshaping everything, and we're at the forefront. We're building a solid cloud foundation for everyone, for every industry, to accelerate intelligence."

Today's foundation models redefine production, interaction, service paradigms, and business models for traditional applications. 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. Huawei Cloud CTO Bruno Zhang said that "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."

William Fang, Chief Product Officer at Huawei Cloud, emphasized the increasing demands on various aspects of cloud infrastructure due to the rapid advancement of AI and foundation models. Customers want collaborative heterogeneous computing architecture, cloud native computing with superlative performance, mass data storage, security compliance, lean governance, and flexible deployment. As foundation models scale into wider use, cloud computing nurtures the innovation and development of AI models. It is only by integrating AI with cloud that progress in intelligence is possible. Huawei Cloud remains committed to making this integration a success, and in turn fulfilling customer demand.

At the Summit, Huawei Cloud unveiled ten AI-oriented innovations that make it the cloud infrastructure of choice for AI.

KooVerse: Huawei Cloud has 85 AZs in 30 Regions across over 170 countries and regions. This global cloud infrastructure covering compute, storage, networking, and security pushes latency down to 50 ms.

Distributed QingTian architecture: Foundation models require a 10-fold growth in demand for compute resources every 18 months, far surpassing Moore's Law. To address this challenge, this architecture evolved from the conventional primary/secondary one. Built on a high-speed interconnect bus (Unified Bus), QingTian surpasses the limitations in compute, storage, and networking for a top-class AI compute backbone with heterogeneous, peer-to-peer, full-mesh computing.

AI compute: Hyperscale and stable, AI Cloud Service supports trillion-parameter model training, and training jobs can run uninterrupted on a cluster over thousands of cards for 30 days, 90% of the time. Service downtime stays within 10 minutes. It provides over 100 Pangu model capability sets and 100 adapted open source large models out of the box.

AI-Native storage: Training models need mountains of data, and Huawei Cloud handles this demand with a three-pronged approach: EMS memory service stores petabytes of parameters with 220 TB ultra-large bandwidth and ultra-low latency down to the microsecond; SFS Turbo cache service for high throughput and concurrency of tens of millions IOPS enables warm-up of 1 billion data records in just 5 hours, not 100; Object Storage Service (OBS) knowledge lake reduces 30% costs in storing training and inference data.

E2E security: The full lifecycle covers model runtime environments, training data, the models themselves, generated content, and applications. This ensures robust, secure, and compliant models and applications.

GaussDB: This next-generation database features high availability, security, performance, flexibility, and intelligence, as well as simple and smart deployment and migration. 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.

Dr. Nikos Ntarmos, Director of Huawei Central Software Institute's Database Lab, emphasized that GaussDB is a result of Huawei's extensive experience in databases spanning over 20 years. Additionally, with over 30 years of proven enterprise services, GaussDB is the better choice for global users, especially for essential transaction and data processing needs.

Data-AI convergence: The explosion of foundation models means "Data+AI" is now "Data4AI and AI4Data". Huawei Cloud LakeFormation unifies data lake from multiple lakes or warehouses so one copy of data is shared among multiple data analytics engines and AI engines without data migration. Three collaborative pipelines — DataArts, ModelArts, and CodeArts — then orchestrate and schedule data and AI workflows. They drive online model training and inference with real-time data. The AI4Data engine makes data governance more intelligent, from data integration, development, to quality and asset management.

Media infrastructure: In this AIGC and 3D Internet era, Huawei Cloud has built a media infrastructure of efficiency, experience, and evolution. Jamy Lyu, President of Huawei Cloud Media Services, shared how Huawei Cloud has innovated and integrated media services into a wide range of industry-tailored solutions. For efficiency, 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.

Landing Zone: Enterprises use and manage resources better on Huawei Cloud thanks to unified account, identity, permissions, network, compliance, and cost management. Now multi-tenancy and collaboration are seamless among personnel, finance, resources, permissions, and security compliance.

Flexible deployment: All mentioned Pangu model capabilities and services can work in public cloud, dedicated cloud, or hybrid cloud. For example, customers can build and run dedicated AI platform and foundation models in their existing data centers using Huawei Cloud Stack, a hybrid cloud solution.

In addition to announcing these ten innovations, Huawei Cloud also highlighted the integration of cloud native and AI technologies as a strategy. This would accelerate the global implementation and advancement of AI. At the Summit, Bruno Zhang unveiled the Global Leap Program by Cloud Native Elite Club (CNEC). With the theme "Leap with Cloud Native × AI", this program will facilitate extensive technical exchanges, in-depth discussions, and best practice showcases.

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024 is taking place in Barcelona from February 26 to 29. Huawei Cloud is set to collaborate with customers and partners to present a wide range of engaging topics, including product and solution launches, Go Cloud Grow Global forum, and Cloud Native Elite Club (CNEC) seminar. Additionally, innovative products and real-world cases covering Pangu models, GaussDB, data-AI convergence, virtual human, and software development will be showcased during the event.