Huawei Cloud is accelerating the digital and intelligent transformation of industries as it presents cloud as the infrastructure of choice for artificial intelligence (AI).

The company unveiled ten AI-oriented innovations, and the extensive industry expertise of its Pangu models, at the Huawei Cloud Summit on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, in Spain, with AI-ready infrastructure tailored to each industry for a faster journey towards intelligence.

Huawei Cloud aims to leverage information and communications technology to help global customers and partners unlock the full potential of intelligence, which will open up new opportunities over the next decade, said Huawei senior VP and European region president Jim Lu during the event themed 'Accelerate Intelligence with Everything as a Service'.

"AI is reshaping everything, and we are at the forefront. We are building a solid cloud foundation for everyone, for every industry, to accelerate intelligence," added Huawei Cloud global marketing and sales service president Jacqueline Shi.

"Today's foundation models redefine production, interaction, service paradigms and business models for traditional applications. They make AI a new engine for the growth of cloud computing," she said, noting that while the potential was vast, implementing AI in line with business objectives required systematic innovation.

There were increasing demands on various aspects of cloud infrastructure owing to the rapid advancement of AI and foundation models, said Huawei Cloud chief product officer William Fang.

"Customers want collaborative heterogeneous computing architecture, cloud native compute with superlative performance, mass data storage, security compliance, lean governance and flexible deployment."

As foundation models scale into wider use, cloud computing nurtures the innovation and development of AI models.

"It is only by integrating AI with cloud that progress in intelligence is possible."

Huawei Cloud CTO Bruno Zhang said that AI for Cloud used AI and foundation models to elevate the experience, with revolutionised software development and digital content production, besides others, while Cloud for AI makes AI adoption seamless and efficient through architectural innovation, AI-native storage and data-AI convergence to empower the client to train and use AI "like never before".

Huawei Cloud's AI-oriented innovations include KooVerse, global cloud infrastructure that covers compute, storage, networking and security that pushes latency down to 50 ms.

With foundation models now requiring ten-fold growth in demand for compute resources every 18 months, Distributed QingTian architecture, evolved from the conventional primary/secondary one and built on a high-speed interconnect bus, surpasses the limitations in compute, storage and networking for an AI compute backbone with heterogeneous, peer-to-peer, full-mesh computing.

AI Cloud Service, meanwhile, supports trillion-parameter model training, with training jobs able to run uninterrupted on a cluster over thousands of cards for 30 days, 90% of the time.

AI-Native storage supports the training models' expansive data requirements through a three-pronged approach, while E2E security ensures robust, secure and compliant models and applications.

Huawei's next-generation AI database, GaussDB, features high availability, security, performance, flexibility and intelligence, as well as simple and smart deployment and migration.

Huawei Cloud further outlined data-AI convergence, with the explosion of foundation models meaning that "Data+AI" is now "Data4AI and AI4Data".

Huawei Cloud LakeFormation unifies data lake from multiple lakes or warehouses to enable sharing of one copy of data among multiple data analytics and AI engines without data migration, after which, three collaborative pipelines, namely DataArts, ModelArts and CodeArts, orchestrate and schedule data and AI workflows, driving online model training and inference with real-time data.

In addition, amid an AI-generated content (AIGC) and three-dimensional Internet era, Huawei Cloud built and integrated media services and infrastructure into a wide range of industry-tailored solutions.

Huawei Cloud MetaStudio, the content production pipeline that includes Workspace and AIGC-based virtual humans, generates better content more rapidly, while Huawei Cloud Live, Low Latency Live and SparkRTC empower more seamless live experiences.

The company's landing zone enables seamless multi-tenancy and collaboration among personnel, finance, resources, permissions and security compliance.

Huawei is also enabling flexible deployment, with all Pangu model capabilities and services able to work in public cloud, dedicated cloud or hybrid cloud.

Huawei Cloud also highlighted the integration of cloud native and AI technologies as a strategy, which will accelerate the global implementation and advancement of AI.

Zhang further unveiled the Global Leap Program by Cloud Native Elite Club, themed "Leap with Cloud Native × AI", to facilitate extensive technical exchanges, in-depth discussions and best practice showcases.

*Natasha Odendaal is a guest of Huawei at the Mobile World Congress 2024, being held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 26 to 29.