Making AI mainstream with an open artificial intelligence ecosystem

Alaa Elshimy, Managing Director and Senior Vice President, Huawei Enterprise Business Group, Middle East.

Artificial intelligence is on the verge of transforming industries and organisations across the Middle East. Huawei is committed to helping customers and partners make the most of the technology’s potential to unlock innovation and economic growth. That transformation will be facilitated by Huawei’s next-generation intelligent product strategy and new artificial intelligence products for the enterprise market.

By adding artificial intelligence capabilities to the next-generation of ICT products—from Wi-Fi 6 to All-Flash Storage—Huawei are helping organisations to address a new round of digital transformation challenges to achieve business success.

To that end, Huawei has its own artificial intelligence strategy that focuses on four key areas. Huawei will push the boundaries of architecture, invest in processors for all scenarios, keep clear business boundaries, and build an open ecosystem. Having a full-stack, all-scenario artificial intelligence portfolio is particularly relevant to customers today, as Huawei offer solutions covering chips, chip enablement, training and inference framework, and application enablement.

In 2019, for example, Huawei unveiled its latest Atlas series of products and 43 cloud services based on Ascend processors with powerful computing capabilities. The Atlas 900 artificial intelligence cluster, Atlas 300 artificial intelligence training card, and Atlas 800 artificial intelligence training server are among the products to have computing power across the globe. Customers can now benefit from more abundant, economical, and adaptive artificial intelligence algorithms for all scenarios.

The Atlas family is oriented to artificial intelligence infrastructures in all scenarios, including the device, edge, and cloud. It can be widely used in smart cities and is already supporting customers in financial, energy, transport, and other industries. With Huawei’s enterprise-class knowledge graph, for example, petroleum industry experts use multi-source knowledge convergence technologies to become over 70% more efficient. 

Huawei estimates that in the next five years, statistical computing will become the mainstream and artificial intelligence computing will account for more than 80% of all computing power used around the world. But before that can become a reality, building an open artificial intelligence ecosystem will be essential. 

And, in the next five years, Huawei will invest another $1.5 billion in its own developer programme. The aim is to expand the programme to support five million developers and enable Huawei’s worldwide partners to develop the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions. 

Huawei is unique in its ability to integrate artificial intelligence and 5G technologies to scale digital services to more people, homes, and organisations than ever before. As more artificial intelligence-driven applications are used in smart manufacturing, telemedicine, banking, and more, it poses higher requirements for connectivity, which 5G is perfectly able to match.

Abundant, high-performance, diversified, greener and inclusive computing power will drive the development of an intelligent society. The goal is to innovate to customer demand and provide computing power for ubiquitous cloud and pervasive intelligence. 


Key takeaways

  • Huawei will invest another $1.5 billion in its own developer programme. 
  • The aim is to expand the programme to support five million developers to develop the next generation of intelligent solutions. 
  • Statistical computing will become mainstream.
  • AI computing will account for more than 80% of all computing power used around the world.
  • The Atlas family is oriented to artificial intelligence infrastructures in all scenarios.

By Alaa Elshimy, Managing Director and Senior Vice President, Huawei Enterprise Business Group, Middle East.