Hong Kong: Leap to Intelligence with a Better Cloud

HONG KONG, April 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Huawei Cloud Summit Hong Kong, themed "Leap to Intelligence", brought together more than 500 prominent figures including government leaders, industry experts, business leaders, and partners to dive into technological innovation, industry practices, and ecosystem development. In addition to showcasing key products and technologies such as Pangu models, Ascend AI Cloud Service, GaussDB, and data-AI convergence, Huawei Cloud also unveiled CloudPond and the Hong Kong AI Acceleration Program in an effort to build Hong Kong into a global AI industry highland.

Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, said in her remarks that Huawei's three-decade accumulation of ICT technologies, innovation, and expertise is now open to Hong Kong as their launchpad towards intelligence with better technologies, industry solutions, and ecosystem resources.

Ir. Tony Wong, JP, Government Chief Information Officer of Hong Kong SAR, stated that The Hong Kong SAR has been committed to giving full play to cloud computing in smart government and smart city. Launched in September 2020, the next-generation Government Cloud Infrastructure Services (GCIS) leverage a secure, stable private cloud and a new application system architecture to facilitate government departments in developing e-gov services at ease and lower costs. Fostering an AI industry ecosystem is also very important to Hong Kong's future. We expect to witness brand-new AI cloud services from Huawei, a leader in the AI realm, propel AI R&D and industry development and ultimately benefit the people of Hong Kong.

According to Mark Chen, President of Huawei Cloud Solution Sales, to turn Hong Kong into a global hub of innovation and technology, Huawei Cloud has packaged leading technologies and best practices into three "Natives": Cloud Native, which a solid cloud foundation; AI Native, which unleashes digital productivity; and Ecosystem Native, which brings the industry together.

Cloud Native: A Solid Cloud Foundation

Huawei Cloud now has 88 AZs in 30 geographical Regions with KooVerse, its global cloud infrastructure. It is the only cloud vendor to deploy a 4-AZ data center in Hong Kong, offering top-notch security and stability for customers, not to mention the 9 ms ultra-low latency.

Customers now have more options to go cloud as Huawei Cloud has extended to wherever needed through its full-fledged distributed cloud infrastructure, including dedicated cloud, Huawei Cloud Stack, and CloudPond.

This is the first time CloudPond is known to the world. Designed with a "One CloudPond, All Cloud Services" concept, CloudPond is an edge service that extends the public cloud to customer premises, featuring cloud-edge collaboration, local data storage, and high stability desired for use cases in smart manufacturing, unmanned driving, and remote diagnosis scenarios.

Huawei Cloud Stack, now in version 8.3, provides six highlights: one solid cloud foundation and five innovations covering databases, mainframe modernization, data lakes, AI models, and industrial Internet. Envisioning the wider adoption of cloud, Huawei Cloud also launched a "Leap2Cloud" initiative to help more customers and partners in Hong Kong bid farewell to virtualization and embrace the cloud.

To ensure network and service stability, Huawei Cloud has SRE centers across the world, translating the inherent uncertainty in rapid business growth into a deterministic SLA for customers. This effort is represented by an SLA of over 99.99% for major Huawei Cloud services.

As William Fang, Huawei Cloud Chief Product Officer said, no industry is spared from digitalization and intelligence. The key to navigating this change is to make the most of cloud.

AI Native: Unleashing Digital Productivity

Huawei Cloud has injected systematic innovation to power Hong Kong's digital intelligence from three dimensions.

First, Pangu models adopt a three-layer "5+N+X" architecture to provide not just general capabilities, but also industry-tailored capabilities especially for government, media, finance, and retail.

Second, an AI cloud service that can be used right out of the box provides stable and reliable AI compute to power efficient model training and inference. This service also includes a full-link cloud-based toolchain to support migration and development. Additionally, Huawei Cloud offers a dedicated zone of foundation models optimized for Ascend Cloud, enabling users to quickly build applications on AI models.

Last but not least, there is no AI without data. GaussDB, a next-generation AI-native distributed database that excels at high availability, security, performance, scalability, and intelligence, allows for a smarter way for database deployment and migration, and greatly improves data processing for AI applications to run smoothly. Huawei Cloud also employs AI to process data, thereby feeding higher-quality data for AI models.

Huawei Cloud works with local organizations and enterprises to develop foundation models and AI applications to suit local needs.

With Huawei Cloud's diverse, efficient, and stable computing power, HKGAI has achieved a significant milestone in AI innovation in Hong Kong by developing the first foundation model trained in the region. According to Hong Kong Observatory, Huawei Cloud's Pangu Weather Model extends the forecast period of computer model weather forecasts from ten to fifteen days. Huawei Cloud published Hong Kong Finance White Paper with PwC, propelling financial security compliance, innovation, and steady growth in Hong Kong.

Ecosystem Native: Better Together

A digital industry ecosystem thrives only with joint efforts.

Huawei Cloud will work with industry partners such as Cyberport Hong Kong to establish an AI industry cloud platform and AI enablement center in Hong Kong to upskill partners.

Talent is a must for AI transformation. At this summit, Huawei Cloud announced the Hong Kong AI Acceleration Program which aims to support 100+ enterprises for AI innovation in the next three years.

Good technologies are a social good. At this summit, William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, shared how Huawei Cloud technologies have helped detect rare diseases, protect the rainforest in Sarawak, Malaysia, and predict extreme weather. Mr. Dong proposed the "Cloud for Good" initiative, calling for concerted efforts from customers and partners from Hong Kong and beyond to promote digital inclusion and a better world with cloud and AI.