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Huawei, a multinational telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer, has announced that it plans to launch its cloud data services in Africa. The cloud services are set to launch in South Africa in March 2019.

Huawei, in a statement, said it is currently working with South African partners for the construction of data centres in Johannesburg, and will later move to Cape Town. Based on the local data centre, the service is expected to be ready for trial use from next week.

Speaking at the recent Cloud Summit in Johannesburg, Farouk Latib – Senior Manager of IT Transformation at Huawei Technologies – outlined the company’s plan for a fully connected Africa driven by data and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

According to the statement, Huawei Cloud will be launched in other regions of Africa, notably Kenya and Nigeria, in the near future. The data cloud services will help African governments, carriers and enterprises in different industries, such as finance, energy and agriculture, to leapfrog to a fully-connected, intelligent era.

“If Cloud 1.0 is an era driven by infrastructure resources, then Cloud 2.0 is the era of cloud-native applications, driven by data and AI platforms,” said Latib. “In the Cloud 2.0 era, infrastructure must meet the rapid development of big data so that hundreds of industries, especially Internet, can mine more dividends from data. The physicality of industries is integrating with IT in deeper ways to improve productivity and socioeconomic benefit.”

Globally, Huawei Cloud has launched over 160 cloud services in 18 categories with over 60 general-purpose solutions, including Internet of Things and security, and industry-specific scenarios such as manufacturing, e-commerce and gaming.

Latib further emphasized the importance of the combination of cloud and AI. He said, “If we compare an enterprise to an aircraft, technologies like AI, IoT and 5G can be regarded as engines, but Cloud is like a runway for the aircraft to take off towards digitisation.”

Last month, Microsoft also reiterated its commitment to building data centres in Africa. First announced in 2017, the American tech company aims to launch the data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town in the first quarter of 2019.