Huawei Cloud has become the first global public cloud provider offering commercial services from an operational data centre in Africa.

The South African facility complies with Tier 3+ standards and uses Huawei’s high-performance chips and network devices.

Huawei is leasing a data centre in Johannesburg from a partner and is deploying localised public cloud services based on local industry policies, customer requirements and partner conditions.

Edward Deng, vice-president of Huawei Cloud business unit, says South Africa is one of the most diverse and promising emerging markets globally, with tremendous potential, and cloud services are expected to unleash the latent capacity and drive the growth in the country.

“We are looking forward to Huawei Cloud’s innovative technologies and services, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence assisting African governments, carriers, and enterprises in a variety of industries such as finance, energy, agriculture, to leapfrog to a fully-connected, intelligent era,” he says.

In addition to the Chinese mainland, Europe and Latin America regions, Huawei Cloud has unveiled regions in Hong Kong, Russia, Thailand and Singapore to date.

By the end of 2018, 40 availability zones had been opened in 23 geographic regions.

Huawei Cloud plans to operate more data centers in Kenya, Nigeria and other countries in Africa to provide localised, safe and reliable services.