Huawei to invest $1.5 billion to support developers

Huawei announced on Wednesday it will invest $1.5 billion to cultivate five million more third-party software and hardware developers on its computing platform, up from the current 1.3 million.

The money will be used to help developers build the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions.

The move is part of Huawei's broader efforts to build an open ecosystem for computing, which the company believes is of utmost importance to building a fully connected, intelligent world.

Hu Houkun, rotating chairman of Huawei, said computing has always been an open industry. No single company can prop up the entire industry on its own; healthy growth requires an open ecosystem and global collaboration.

According to him, the company's computing strategy has four parts, including architecture innovation and a commitment to all-scenario processors.

"Processors are the basic building block of the computing industry. After years of hard work and investment, we've released several families of processors for different scenarios," Hu said.

The company already has a full lineup: Kunpeng processors for general purpose computing, Ascend processors for AI, Kirin processors for smart devices and Honghu processors for smart screens. Moving forward, Huawei will release more processors for different scenarios.

"We will not sell these processors as standalone products. We will use these processors in our own cloud services and sell them in the form of components such as AI servers, accelerator cards and modules to help our partners integrate AI computing into their own products and solutions," Hu said.

The company said its software will also be open-source. That includes software like server operating systems, databases and AI development frameworks. The move will help partners develop better commercial software more easily.