Huawei goes big on cloud computing, invests in South Africa

Chinese technology giant Huawei is expanding its cloud computing service with further investments in South Africa.

Huawei southern Africa president of Huawei Cloud, Stone He, on Thursday morning announced a new “availability zone” to be built in Cape Town in the next two years. Availability zones are data centres housing the company’s infrastructure for cloud and mobile computing services.

He said while Huawei’s market share may be relatively small, it has aggressive growth plans, going so far as saying that if Huawei Cloud fails, Huawei as a whole would struggle.

Huawei has faced political headwinds in recent years after the US government placed restrictions on its use the Google Android operating system on its devices.

This led to the company’s cellphone business, in strong competition likes of Samsung and Apple, to lose market to relatively small and unknown brands like Tecno and others. The ban on working with American companies also placed pressure on its 5G business, though it still leads the way in rolling out this technology across Africa.

The pressure prompted the company to invest heavily in other sectors, such as developing its own software and operating systems, and now the push into cloud computing.

Huawei’s cloud computing revenue topped $383 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow exponentially in coming years. Huawei is staking a lot on grabbing market share from the leaders in international cloud computing, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure.

He said South Africa was important for the company’s road map after the company managed to book $5 million (R71 million) revenue in Africa last year, with the largest slice coming from South Africa.

Huawei saw substantial business growth locally in public cloud and hybrid cloud last year, with significant income from the public and finance sectors as well as from the telecommunication industry.

“We are also proud of our three-fold increase in our customer base and our registered South Africa partners have doubled. We predict these numbers to grow substantially over the next few months and we see South Africa becoming a cloud hub for the continent,” said He.

Huawei already has two  data centres located in Johannesburg after opening the first in 2019 and the second last year.

He also hinted at the possibility of another availability zone in Durban, though this wasn’t confirmed.