Huawei to invest $200 million this year in building computing ecosystem

Huawei Technologies Co said on Friday it will invest $200 million this year to support third-party developers that use its computing solutions, as the Chinese tech giant underlined once again its long-term commitment to computing.

The move is part of a broader $1.5 billion package that Huawei announced in 2019 that it would invest over the next five years to build a vibrant ecosystem of developers.

"Developers are the key to changing the computing world. They are the engine of enterprise innovations, and the soul of new industry ecosystems," Hou Jinlong, president of Huawei's Cloud & AI business group, said.

"We will continue to work with global developers and industry partners to provide robust, economical computing power by leveraging the multi-core, high-concurrency advantages of Kunpeng processors. Together, we will unlock the trillion dollar blue ocean market of the computing industry and share the success of the digital economy," Hou explained.

Kunpeng processors are developed by Huawei on the basis of ARM chip architecture, a chip design developed by the British company Arm Holdings.

Hou said the company now has 1.6 million developers working on Huawei Cloud, and it hopes to increase the number to 5 million developers by the end of 2025.

Charlie Dai, principal analyst at business strategy and economic consultancy Forrester, said Huawei's computing strategy demonstrates the importance of leveraging holistic hardware and software spectrum to fully unleash the power of AI in the cloud.

ARM-based chips have unique value for computing. Huawei's investment in ARM-based servers not only supports broader business scenarios. It also effectively improves business agility in the increasingly dynamic macroeconomic environment, Dai added.

Analysts said China's recent emphasis on developing new infrastructure such as data centers will bring opportunities to Huawei's computing business.

Early this month, a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee called for accelerated efforts to build new infrastructure, including 5G base stations and data centers, in China.

Hou said: "The infrastructure for a digital society is computing power and Huawei has a unique edge in this respect. We hope to partner with all developers to build China's new infrastructure."

Huawei also announced on Friday it is working with partners such as Tencent Games to be part of the Kunpeng ecosystem and the company hopes that Kunpeng can become the foundation for future IT development in multiple markets. It added this will mutually benefit all players in the digital economy.

In November, Huawei partnered with Peng Cheng Lab, a key research facility in Guangdong province, to launch an upgraded AI computing system called CloudBrain. The system is an underlying architecture to support a wide range of applications such as smart healthcare, smart transportation and urban management.

"In the first stage, CloudBrain's computing ability will increase five times and it will be enhanced by another 10 times next year. It will become the world's largest AI computing cluster by then," PCL director Gao Wen said.