Huawei’s cloud division has seen significant growth outside of China over the last few years, with a sizable uptake in Europe.
The company said its cloud business had expanded by 50% outside mainland China, with 140 carriers and 500 financial institutions adopting its digital services. Within Europe, the company said it now had more than 33,000 customers, many of which have been amassed over the last two years.
Speaking after its Cloud Summit in Barcelona, ahead of MWC 2025, Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud’s global marketing and sales service, told ITPro that part of its success outside of China can be attributed to its customer-focused approach to services.
“Cloud is a global business and the hyperscalers have their own advantages,” Shi said. “Huawei Cloud practices ‘everything as a service’, which means we care a lot about our customer’s needs. We listen to them and customize our solutions to them.”
The company’s success was also noted by Gartner at the tail end of 2024, as it was named a ‘Challenger’ in the research institute’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.
Part of the report’s results are based on the ability of vendors to execute a ‘completeness of vision’ – which essentially means the product has both good availability in specific regions, but also that it serves those regions with what they need. Which also highlights Huawei’s customer-centric approach.
Huawei’s cloud databases have been widely deployed across 33 regions, with flagship products including its AI native database management platform GaussDB, and its data warehouse service, GaussDB(DWS).
Huawei Cloud's push from ‘cloud native’ to AI native’
During its Cloud Summit, Shi spoke at length about Huawei Cloud’s AI strategy and how the Chinese company aims to transition from cloud native to AI native. Shi defines ‘AI native’ in two ways; one is "AI for Cloud", which means it reshapes and upgrades all of the company’s services into intelligent ones using AI.
The other is "Cloud for AI", which is the aim of building the best platform, with compute architecture, data, modeling tools, and professional services, to accelerate the development of AI.
Huawei Cloud is now working towards the construction of AI native infrastructure, such as a CloudMatrix and AI Cloud Service. Here it will develop AI native cloud services for databases, knowledge lakes, and software development pipelines.
It will also offer AI models and tools for customers and partners so that they can train and run their AI models.
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