A Huawei, a global provider of ICT infrastructure and smart devices, has committed to using its own digital transformation expertise to help African customers accelerate business intelligence.
Dawei LI, Huawei Vice President for Sub-Saharan Africa, spoke about diversified computing centers and the possibility of a green and smart Africa at the recent Pan-African Data Center Exhibition and Conference in Johannesburg, which was attended by approximately 3000 global data center power customers.
Li spoke about Huawei's position and solutions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing and data centers, as well as the company's latest insights and goals in Africa.
Artificial intelligence is the boss.
Regarding AI, Li stated that in the age of AI, data flows more quickly and the value of data as a production tool becomes increasingly essential. “Data centers are responsible for centralized storage, computing and exchange of data resources. Huawei provides diverse and rapidly growing service data storage products and solutions.”
“Firstly, through data protection services throughout the entire lifecycle, customer service can always be online, data will be stored long-term and will never be lost, ensuring data security for the smart world.”
“In addition, Huawei provides storage operation support services to help customers efficiently manage data, activate data value, and promote service innovation.”
Everyone is gaining access to the cloud
In terms of cloud computing, Li believes that African consumers across a range of industries are aggressively adopting cloud and AI technology. However, he stressed that they still face problems in switching to and using cloud services, such as frequent failures in underwater optical cables, problems accessing cloud resources and data localization.
Li said Huawei Cloud is one of the fastest-growing cloud service providers in the world, and as a result, the company aims to provide cutting-edge technology to consumers on the mainland and offer them the best options.
In response to the problems faced by African customers, Li said Huawei Cloud mainly provides support in three areas. “First, Huawei Cloud provides various solutions such as public cloud, hybrid cloud and edge cloud to meet customer service requirements in different development phases and service scenarios.
“Secondly, in recent years, we have continued to reinforce our investment in cloud infrastructures in Africa. Providing local cloud services in South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and other locations allows African customers to easily access the best performing, truly reliable, secure and compliant cloud.
“Finally, Huawei Cloud has accumulated Huawei's own digital transformation experience and excellent practices in other regions of the world into the cloud, and worked with partners to create industrial scenario solutions to help African customers accelerate business intelligence.”
Data centers are the new homes
In data centers, Li said that as the tides of globalization and intelligence collide, Africa finds itself at a new turning point in the development of artificial intelligence. Li stressed that intelligent computing has already brought four major changes to data centers.
“The Shortest Construction Period. Referring to the rapidly growing trend of ChatGPT users, data centers, as smart computing infrastructure, require faster, better and more flexible construction to meet the demands of business development.”
“The ability to build quickly and with high quality has become the main competitiveness of the data center business. Data centers require an increasingly shorter construction period, from 18 to 24 months previously to 9 to 10 months currently, and this has brought enormous challenges to our construction model.”
Secondly, Li points to higher power density, stating: “The power density of a single cabinet in a data center is increasing rapidly due to the higher power consumption of AI servers. The requirement for a single enclosure grows from 5 to 8 kW to 40 to 60 kW, or even more than 100 kW (for example, NVIDIA's latest intelligent computing enclosure reaches 120 kW/cabin).
In conclusion, Li said that not everything is gloomy as companies like Huawei have solutions to support the implementation of smart computing on the mainland. Li detailed Huawei's solutions: “With all the requirements and challenges, customers need long-term stable and evolving data center facilities to support their business development, which must be more comprehensive, efficient and intelligent in terms of of architecture design, business launch and system operation.”
