Chinese ICT giant Huawei will build a data centre facility in Johannesburg to provide public cloud services, becoming the latest multinational after Microsoft and Amazon.com to unveil such plans.

TechCentral can reveal that Huawei will use the South African facility to provide cloud services to all countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

South Africa is an important piece of Huawei’s cloud globalisation map, the company said on Monday.

South Africa is an important piece of Huawei’s cloud globalisation map

The company will officially unveil its plans at an industry conference in Cape Town on 14 November.

Huawei’s Cloud Business Unit was established in March 2017. Since then, it has unveiled more than 120 cloud services in 18 major categories. These cover more than 60 general solutions, including SAP, high-performance computing, Internet of things, security, development operations and over 80 industry scenario solutions, including manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, finance and Internet of vehicles.

Huawei Cloud has been launched with facilities in Hong Kong, Russia and Thailand in 2018. By end September 2018, it provided services in Asia-Pacific and partner public cloud services in Europe and Latin America, outside of the Chinese market.

Major regions

Huawei Cloud and Huawei partner public cloud are available in 14 countries and regions, and will be available in most of the major regions around the world by end of 2018, it said.

The company said that ultimately there will be five major cloud platforms in the world and promised it would be one of those five.

The location of the Johannesburg data centre has not yet been disclosed, and it’s not immediately clear when it will be available for service. It’s also not known how much Huawei is investing in launching the service in the region.

The move comes as Microsoft gears up to launch two Azure data centres in South Africa by the end of the year, one in Cape Town and the other in Johannesburg.

Last month, the world’s biggest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, said it will also open data centre facilities in South Africa. The new AWS “infrastructure region” will be launched in the first half of 2020 and will allow customers to run workloads in South Africa and serve end users across the African continent with lower latency. — (c) 2018 NewsCentral Media