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Next Huawei battle with the US will be fought over the cloud

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Next Huawei battle with the US will be fought over the cloud
News Analysis IAIN MORRIS, International Editor 9/24/2021

A Chinese radio might include malware for spying or even crippling national infrastructure, US policymakers have said in justifying their campaign against Huawei. If that's so, then a Chinese cloud storing all kinds of information about countries, companies and people seems far more troubling. The US has done a good job of bashing Huawei's device and network businesses. But as those crawl along, Huawei Cloud looks rampant.

Rampant enough for Senator Tom Cotton and Member of Congress Mike Gallagher, two vociferous critics of Huawei, to write to Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, and ask him what the Biden administration is doing to stop it. Huawei Cloud, the Chinese firm's newish cloud business, already has more than 70 agreements with foreign governments or state-backed enterprises, they say. Unchecked, it could expose Huawei's clients to the "prying eyes" of the Chinese Communist Party.

Their deepest fear seems to be that China obtains information about Americans who visit or work in the countries where Huawei Cloud is active. According to the US policymakers, those include countries "of immense geopolitical importance to the US." Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are all on the list.

Huawei already boasts one of the largest public clouds in China, and it is rolling quickly into other territory. "Huawei Cloud is the fastest-growing cloud service provider in the Asia Pacific," said Eric Xu, one of Huawei's rotating bosses, during a press conference earlier today. "Our Huawei Cloud team hopes to become one of the top three cloud service providers in the Asia Pacific in a short period of time."

To achieve its target, Huawei plans to invest about $100 million over the next three years in a program called Spark. Its purpose is to help small and medium-sized enterprises migrate their systems to its cloud platform. The public sector is evidently seen as another opportunity. "We hope and believe that Huawei Cloud will become the cloud service provider of choice for governments and enterprises in particular," said Xu.

Huawei clean-up

Stopping it may be like trying to halt the drift of a cumulonimbus. US legislators were able to sabotage Huawei's hardware activities by cutting it off from suppliers that used American technology. They cannot prevent Huawei from writing code or hiring the Chinese software experts it needs. As Huawei Cloud seeps into new markets, their only real option is to lean heavily on other governments, pressuring them not to buy Chinese software.

This tactic formed part of the campaign against Huawei's 5G business and seems partly responsible for the clampdown that happened in the UK last year. Cotton and Gallagher reckon 60 countries and 200 telecom companies joined an initiative called Clean Network, launched by Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State under Donald Trump. The signatories pledged not to buy Chinese network products. Under a sub-initiative dubbed Clean Cloud, which included products from Chinese cloud providers such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom and Tencent.

What's unclear is whether Joe Biden shares the same commitment to this Clean Network initiative. If he does not, Cotton and Gallagher want to know what – if anything – will succeed it. Their letter to Blinken includes a list of other questions, most of which seem to be about dissuading countries from signing cloud contracts with Huawei.

While Xu declined to comment on the latest American rumblings, Huawei is clearly working from the opposite side to win allies and overcome doubts. "This is something that the team at Huawei Cloud have been have working toward – using technology infrastructure to deliver a secure and trustworthy cloud so that customers can sleep soundly at night," he said.

A lot now rides on the success of that business while others crumble under US sanctions pressure. Huawei made about $50 billion in smartphone revenues last year but expects sales to fall by $30 billion to $40 billion this year.

"It will take rather a long time to compensate for the $30 billion to $40 billion lost by applying 5G and other technologies to different industry sectors," Xu told reporters. Denied the hardware it needs in 5G, Huawei must see the cloud as one of its most promising growth opportunities. It is also shaping up to be the next front in its battle with the US.


[Shenzhen, China, September 23, 2021] HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 opened today, with Eric Xu, Huawei Rotating Chairman, delivering a keynote speech Innovating Nonstop for Faster Digitalization that included the launch of HUAWEI CLOUD UCS. This Ubiquitous Cloud-Native Service is the industry's first distributed cloud-native product. Zhang Ping'an, CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD and President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Service spoke about HUAWEI CLOUD: Everything as a Service. In this keynote, two new regions were announced, and ten new services launched include MacroVerse aPaaS, OptVerse AI Solver, HUAWEI CLOUD Stack 8.1, Pangu drug molecule model, and SparkRTC. Zhang also announced the first virtual human, Yunsheng, to join HUAWEI CLOUD.

Four years into its development, HUAWEI CLOUD has attracted 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consulting partners, 6,000 technical partners, and released 4,500 Marketplace products. HUAWEI CLOUD has become an important platform for Internet companies and organizations to go digital. More and more enterprises have joined hands with HUAWEI CLOUD to embrace digitalization. Emergencias, a top medical service company in Argentina, used HUAWEI CLOUD for remote diagnosis and treatment. Wuliangye, a renowned brand for Chinese baijiu, underwent total digital transformation with HUAWEI CLOUD, from brewing, distribution, to sales. Conch Cement deployed its IT system on HUAWEI CLOUD and built a smart factory and greener industry through collaboration on technological innovation, including 5G, cloud, and AI.

Zhang used these success stories to illustrate the key to digital success. "For the past 30 years, Huawei has been relentless in connecting the world. For the next 30 years, we build the cloud foundation for an intelligent future – Infrastructure as a Service for global accessibility, Technology as a Service for flexible innovation, and Expertise as a Service for shared excellence," he said. "Digitalization is a wealth of opportunities, and we call on all to think cloud native, act cloud native. Let's dive into digital and into the potential of Everything as a Service."

Zhang Ping'an

Zhang Ping'an, CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD and President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Service

Infrastructure as a Service for Global Accessibility

HUAWEI CLOUD continues to expand its global data center and network vision to connect the globe with a seamless media experience for customers. Ulanqab joins Mexico as the two new regions and the world's largest rendering base of HUAWEI CLOUD, with the computing power of ten thousand cores for rapid rendering of images. By September 2021, HUAWEI CLOUD and partners operate 61 Availability Zones (AZs) in 27 geographic regions worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions.

HUAWEI CLOUD works with partners towards a global cloud alliance, giving customers and partners access to cloud resources with a single account, interface, and invoice. Christophe Ozer, Head of Orange Cloud (Orange Flexible Engine) APAC, shared his experience with HUAWEI CLOUD in helping customers develop globally. He said, "From Asia Pacific to Europe, we provide one network and one cloud for data interconnection and global innovation."

Audiovisual network services are now a basic requirement for many digital applications. This year's HUAWEI CONNECT saw the launch of SparkRTC, a real-time audio and video cloud service that covers more than 170 countries and regions with a reliability up to 99.99% and latency under 200 ms.

Technology as a Service for Flexible Innovation

Enterprise customers avoid "reinventing the wheel". They want solutions that will help them use cutting-edge digital technologies as conveniently as water and electricity. This will greatly reduce repetitive work, allowing them to focus on innovation, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Huawei will continue to share its advantages built by 100,000 engineers and an average annual R&D investment of USD10 billion. The solutions provider offers fundamental technologies such as operating systems, databases, AI, compilers, codecs, and algorithms to customers, partners, and developers across a wide variety of industries through cloud services.

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2021, Zhang Ping'an released innovations such as OptVerse AI Solver, Pangu drug molecule model, Blockchain Service, and the FunctionGraph function computing service. He also announced three technical upgrades to HUAWEI CLOUD GaussDB, while HUAWEI CLOUD Stack was upgraded to 8.1. HUAWEI CLOUD Stack 8.1 now supports eight services, including AI inference, big data governance, and cloud desktop, to provide more than 80 cloud services in 12 categories, making it the solution with the widest range of on-premises cloud services.

HUAWEI CLOUD's OptVerse AI Solver pushes operations research beyond the limits of operation optimization. This innovation solves problems with hundreds of millions of variables, at 100x computing speed thanks to distributed parallel acceleration. AI-enabled modeling is 30 times more efficient than manual modeling, while AI-based adaptive tuning is 30% more efficient than manual parameter setting. Thanks to these metrics, OptVerse AI Solver ranks first on the Hans Mittelmann Benchmark for Simplex LP solvers.

The OptVerse AI Solver has been used by Tianjin Port for global optimization scheduling. Wu Qiang, Vice President of Tianjin Port Holdings, said, "Tianjin Port is one of the world's top 10 ports, with an annual throughput of nearly 20 million containers. HUAWEI CLOUD's OptVerse AI Solver helps us make planning 100 times faster even with tens of millions of variables and constraints. We've maximized resource scheduling and greatly improved operation efficiency."

At the Huawei Developer Conference (Cloud) 2021, HUAWEI CLOUD released the Pangu hyper-scale pre-trained AI model. Chen Haining, General Manager of IT Dept from Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB), shared how they build the SPDB Finwarehouse with Huawei. The Pangu large model identified the container type and quantity of goods in storage. "By deeply integrating digital technologies into industries, we can use digital capabilities to drill down into supply chain scenarios of various real economy industries. SPDB chooses to work with Huawei to boost the economy."

Following that conference, the HUAWEI CLOUD Pangu drug molecule model was unveiled at HUAWEI CONNECT 2021. A joint release by HUAWEI CLOUD and Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) of Chinese Academy of Sciences, this model learns the chemical structure of 1.7 billion small molecules and assists in drug design throughout the entire process for enhanced R&D efficiency. Among the first achievements of this model is a new broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug designed by the First Affiliated Hospital of Medical School of Xi'an Jiaotong University, who shortened the lead compound R&D cycle from several years to one month.

Expertise as a Service for Shared Excellence

Zhang Ping'an launched the MacroVerse aPaaS, positioned by HUAWEI CLOUD as the aPaaS for industries. It takes expertise and innovations from industry digital transformation and builds them into cloud platform services for industry developers. MacroVerse provides mobile developers five digital engines: payment, search, browsing, map, and advertising. Mobile applications developed based on HUAWEI CLOUD can be released to Huawei AppGallery with one click. In nine vertical markets, including industrial, automobile, retail, healthcare, interactive media, and news, HUAWEI CLOUD MacroVerse provides more than 50 scenario-specific cloud services, 128 Kits, and over 20,000 APIs.

Huawei Hetu cloud integrates 2D or 3D digital information into any physical space to seamlessly merge the physical and digital worlds. It has been applied in more than 20 scenarios, including museums, shopping malls, and historical relics.

HUAWEI CLOUD WeLink leverages Huawei's own digital office experience and has served 180 Fortune China 500 enterprises. In addition to a major upgrade, HUAWEI CLOUD WeLink will be launched in more countries this October.

HUAWEI CLOUD's new digital media pipeline automates film and television production. Jiang Chuanrong, Chairman of Shanghai Mirror Pictures, took the stage as the first joint innovation partner to use this pipeline in industry.

Building on HUAWEI CLOUD's digital content production line, HUAWEI CLOUD created the first virtual human, Yunsheng, to join HUAWEI CLOUD.

Digitalization is a wealth of opportunity. The key is to think cloud native, act cloud native, and apply this all-digital, all-cloud, AI-driven mindset to explore the potential of everything as a service. HUAWEI CLOUD is committed to building the cloud foundation for an intelligent world with ubiquitous cloud and pervasive intelligence.
 

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