Huawei’s cloud unit opens new data centre in Riyadh as it turns to Saudi Arabia for new business amid resistance in West
- Huawei is aiming to ‘support Chinese companies to explore the Saudi Arabia market and also help Saudi companies to go global’
- Data centre in Riyadh to provide public cloud services for clients in the country as well as the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia
Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies is eyeing opportunities in Saudi Arabia with its first public cloud service in the Middle East, while it faces increasing geopolitical tensions in Western markets.
Huawei said on Monday it had launched a data centre in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to provide public cloud services for clients in the country as well as other parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
With the new cloud services that offer a range of capabilities including artificial intelligence (AI) applications, Huawei is aiming to “support Chinese companies to explore the Saudi Arabia market and also help Saudi companies to go global”, a company representative said in a briefing.
The company plans to support 200,000 new developers in Saudi Arabia, and work with 1,000 local partners and 2,000 start-ups with its cloud computing services over the next five years.
At the company’s cloud event in Riyadh on Monday, Huawei also introduced its Pangu AI model, which has been trained to support the Arabic language.
“This technology will serve as a catalyst to accelerate the growth of local enterprises,” Steven Yi, president of Huawei Middle East and Central Asia Region, said at the event.