At the annual Huawei event ‘Huawei Connect 2024’ held in Shanghai, China on the 19th, David Wang, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Huawei and the board member in charge of ICT infrastructure management, delivered a keynote speech on the theme of “Expanding Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence.” Wang emphasized that Huawei will work with customers and partners to build future-proof infrastructure and develop various industry-specific solutions to promote economic and social development.
The theme of Huawei Connect this year was ‘Amplify Intelligence,’ which brought together global business leaders, technical experts, partners, developers, and more. Wang shared Huawei’s views and experiences on the digitalization and intelligence of industries, and unveiled completely new solutions for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the industrial environment.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to be driven by digital and intelligent technologies, Huawei has presented four stages that countries need to follow in their digital and intelligent transformation journey. Each stage builds upon the previous one.
Wang stressed that innovation is essential in addressing the challenges and opportunities that arise during this process. Huawei is focusing on innovation in building robust infrastructure through technological innovation, resolving digital divides for more people through scenario innovation, and creating an ecosystem for a brighter future through ecosystem innovation.
In core areas such as connectivity, storage, computing, cloud, and energy, Huawei is constructing next-generation infrastructure through system-level innovations. In terms of intelligent connectivity, Huawei accelerates agile cloud migration and on-demand intelligence using high transmission capacity. Future-oriented data storage supports large-scale intelligence and optimized data supply systems, while in computing, Huawei collaborates with partners to build robust computing backbones and complete the industrial ecosystem with Kunpeng and Ascend chips, providing another choice for global users.
Huawei has developed processors such as ‘Kunpeng’ for general computing and ‘Ascend’ for AI computing over the past five years, offering new options to the global market. Through these efforts, Huawei has collaborated with 7,600 partners and 6.35 million developers, and developed over 20,000 industrial solutions.
‘Kunpeng’ has been widely adopted in various industries such as public services, finance, telecommunications, and power. The open-source operating system ‘openEuler’ based on Kunpeng holds the leading market share of 36.8% in the Chinese server OS market. ‘openEuler’ has recorded over 3.5 million downloads and is used in over 150 countries.
In the cloud field, Huawei is building clouds tailored to various industries, fostering a rich environment for industrial and digital intelligence transformation. Huawei is also putting considerable effort into establishing environmentally friendly energy infrastructure to support the digital world.
At the event, Huawei unveiled the new ‘CANN 8.0,’ a foundational component of the Ascend ecosystem, which enables in-depth optimization by supporting more than 200 new basic operators, 80 fusion operators, and 100 APIs for communication and matrix multiplication. ‘CANN 8.0’ shortens the time required to complete tasks from two people in a month to 1.5 people in a week.
Furthermore, Huawei has released the openMind application support kit to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises. The kit is expected to help companies quickly build their AI communities and create ecosystems.
Wang stated that Huawei is continuously striving to build the Kunpeng and Ascend ecosystems, investing 1 billion yuan (approximately 188.6 billion won) annually and planning to develop over 1,500 Kunpeng and Ascend-based application partners over the next three years.
Additionally, Wang mentioned that Huawei will continue research on GDI as intelligent applications become more widely adopted, which is expected to evolve into the Global Digitalization & Intelligence Index (GDII) for global digital economic development reference. Huawei plans to train over 10 million digital and intelligent professionals by 2030 and create a foundation for a thriving ecosystem, contributing to the prosperity and sustainable development of industries.