Huawei Cloud, the cloud division of Chinese multinational, Huawei, chose Paris, France, as the venue for its latest Huawei Cloud Summit. The summit was held during HUAWEI CONNECT 2024, a two-day event where Huawei brought together local business leaders, academics, government representatives, and industry specialists. Over the course of the event, Huawei and its eco-system partners showcased and discussed innovation, and the reshaping of modern organisations’ digital cloud practices.
Huawei’s cloud division, Huawei Cloud, set the flavour of HUAWEI CONNECT 2024 with the appearance of Jacqueline Shi (President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service) as a multi-lingual digital avatar, one that was created and finessed with Huawei Cloud’s MetaStudio — see below.
“In Europe, Huawei Cloud has collaborated with over 500 local partners to deliver a wide range of industry-specific solutions and proven expertise,” Ms Shi said. “Innovation is the heart of our success, our competitiveness, and our growth. That’s why we invest heavily in R&D to bring you the most secure and reliable cloud services possible, including cloud native, AI, and big data.”
The event saw the presentation and exploration of many of Huawei Cloud’s capabilities, and exposure for the company’s projects that invest in the vitality of local and Europe-wide business, its infrastructure, established and startup enterprises, and European digital transformation initiatives.
Huawei’s President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, William Dong, giving the event’s (in-person) keynote, explained that the company’s strategy for France and the wider region comes in two parts: AI for cloud, and cloud for AI.
At the heart of ‘AI for cloud’ is Huawei’s Pangu large language model (LLM) that makes data-driven organisations operate more effectively and efficiently. Huawei Cloud offers AI for Industry solutions, designed for use in specific industry sectors, including retail, engineering, medicine, meteorology, finance, media, and education.
Huawei Cloud’s MetaStudio, for example, is a full digital content production pipeline that provides a range of AI-powered capabilities for animators, TV companies, film studios, and special effects houses, amongst others. The MetaStudio AIGC (Artificial Intelligence and Generative Content) can create virtual characters that ‘speak’ 20 languages, with each individually lip-synced to give realistic, localised audio and visual content that’s ready for international audiences.
AIGC can also be used in animation production, with as few as 30 images enough to train the AI in a particular, individual art style. At that point, creatives can concentrate on plot, dialogue, aesthetic perspectives, personality and their artistic creativity, with MetaStudio able to create rendered animations in a fraction of the time needed for traditional animation methods.
Huawei’s ‘Cloud for AI’ strategy covers data centres, cloud platform architectures, and infrastructure services, including iPaaS. The focus is on data preparation, training, inference, and the readying of data for use by foundational Pangu models.
Running concurrently with the Huawei Cloud Summit, the Huawei Cloud Industry Partner Innovation Program (HCIPIP) was an event that included 20 ecosystem partners of Huawei Cloud, plus the company itself and leading technology organisations. HCIPIP comprised two days of talks, demonstrations, and discussions, like the round-table hosted by the Cloud Native Elite Club (CNEC).
The Huawei Cloud Industry Partner Innovation Program saw the CNEC invite its first European members to join this technical community, which was established in China in 2020. In Europe, the CNEC will focus on cloud native transformation, AI, data, media services, and cloud system reliability. The broad aims of the Club are to drive technological innovation, share experiences, and showcase pioneering practices to foster the growth of the European technical ecosystem.
Huawei Cloud also used the CONNECT 2024 event to promote its new partnership with Paris-based Station F, the world’s biggest startup incubator, together launching a sustainability-themed incubation program for startups in the industrial, retail, and new-energy vehicle sectors. Huawei’s programme at Station F will provide the first intake of ten companies with cloud resources, mentorship, technical guidance, investment opportunities, and dedicated office space.
