The United Arab Emirates is a country where, according to the Middle East Institute: “Modernity dominates everything from the architecture of Abu Dhabi and Dubai to the technology that drives the economy.”

It’s the country that, at the time of writing, is hosting the Huawei Cloud Summit. The event is part of the huge Gitex 2024 event, embodying the country’s psyche of technology and modernity. It’s part of ethos of the society that has emerged since the country’s oil boom of the 1970s. According to Matthew MacLean of New York University Abu Dhabi: “The most powerful force behind the formation of a national identity in the UAE was the collective experience of modernization.”

Part of the UAE’s modernity has come about by its redefinition of what it means to be Emirati. The country’s population is only 11.5% indigenous, the rest of the population comprising newcomers, each nationality forming part of the new definition of what it means to be an Emirati. Speaking exclusively to Tech HQ, Sebastian Shi, Managing Director of Huawei Cloud UAE, said, “The UAE and the region in general are very inclusive. You see technologies from the East, you see technology from the West.”

As a company, Huawei believes in investment, not only in technological infrastructure, an area in which it is renown, but also in the people of the UAE and the wider region. Local investment, and the ability to address the needs of governments and enterprises mean the Chinese multinational is establishing itself as an integral part of the modernity that defines the UAE and much of the region.

The AI and big capabilities of the Huawei Cloud are industry-focused, with solutions ready to use by the area’s growth sectors; utilities, manufacturing, media, healthcare, and education. In the case of the latter, Sebastian said he is particularly proud of the company’s work with Ankabut, the UAE’s largest ICT services provider. It works with over 30 educational institutions over 80 campuses in the region.

“Ankabut began a partnership with Huawei two or three years back. It deployed an educational cloud utilising a Huawei cloud technology foundation, and through that, it’s providing its own services with the latest technology, including cloud, to universities, to [education] institutions in the UAE. We enable the universities to have more efficient deployments of their applications. I’m really happy to see that we are getting more and more tenants to migrate their workload onto that cloud.”

On the ground, Huawei has invested in furthering the technical education of Emiratis, bringing a new generation of IT professionals through its training programmes in cloud technologies.

Sebastian conceded that a great deal of cloud technology training courses are vendor-agnostic, but differentiated the company’s offerings: “We do have quite some uniqueness. For example, [the Huawei Cloud] is very strong in artificial intelligence and in big data, so we definitely need our partners and our customers to master all those skill sets required to utilise the full power of the technologies.”

Providing local resources – data centres serving powerful cloud-based offerings and professionals to run and support their operations – is a central part of Huawei’s physical investment in the region. In some cases, such as finance, having a ‘local’ cloud can be a deal-maker. There’s strong regulation on data residency in the Middle East, for example, and financial institutions are often mandated to maintain domestic data sovereignty. Huawei’s data centres mean they’re the logical choice.

The presence of multiple data centres in the region gives companies in highly-regulated markets the wherewithal to grow outside domestic borders. “The majority of fintech players, or payment companies, are operating not only in the UAE, [but] in the whole region across different countries. So our advantage is the local data centres’ presence. We really contribute a lot of value to those companies,” Sebastian said.

Huawei isn’t the only cloud provider in the Middle East, of course. But its investment in local infrastructure and workforce means it can outperform its competitors, Sebastian said. “For the majority of customers working with Huawei, we always have on-site engineers. [They] sit with our customers to make sure that when they migrate into the Huawei cloud, or when they’re using the Huawei cloud, there’s no technical issue that cannot be addressed right away.”

In a country that’s building its own future on being at the forefront of technology, Huawei continues to develop cutting-edge resources that are in step with the UAE’s aims and ideals. “We will definitely be among those who are providing technologies and contributing to the development of society in the UAE,” Sebastian said. “And if you look at what market will need in next five years, I think there’s a very big portion of technology that will come from the Eastern part of the world.”