Huawei Cloud today announced a new Arabic large language model (LLM). The company also launched its Cairo Region, making Huawei Cloud the first company to launch a public cloud in Egypt. The Cairo Region covers 28 African countries including Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria, and contributes to Huawei Cloud’s support of the digital transformation of vertical industries. Shared at the Huawei Cloud Summit in Cairo, the announcement brings Huawei Cloud’s total number of regions to 33 worldwide.
Huawei Cloud’s new Arabic LLM is an important step in supporting companies in the region with the digital transformation of vertical industries. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) service supports functions covering over 20 Arabic-speaking countries, with accuracy rate reaching 96%. It is the first 100 billion-parameter Arabic LLM in the industry. The model has been trained with native Arabic data, ensuring an accurate understanding of the local culture, history, knowledge customs and more of the Arab world, rather than relying on a body of English work and translating. As an important part of Huawei Cloud’s Pangu model’s endeavor to support vertical industries with AI capabilities, the training of the Arabic LLM is based on industry datasets covering digital power, oil and gas, finance and more.
The model is supported by the capabilities of Huawei’s newly launched Cairo Region. Huawei Cloud is the first cloud provider to launch a public cloud in Egypt. The new region enables cloud capabilities across 28 African countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria. Huawei Cloud has been offering services on its platform including the DataArts data governance pipeline including the GaussDB database, and the ModelArts AI development pipeline.
“With the release of the new Arabic language model, we are bringing our most innovative technologies to Egypt, to further support the country unlock digital transformation,” said Jacqueline Shi, President of Global Marketing and Sales Services at Huawei Cloud. “The launch of these cloud services is an important step in Huawei Cloud being able to enhance our services to customers in the region. We believe that every country should have AI capabilities to preserve its local culture and that AI models should be developed and trained with local languages, enabling vertical industries to become more efficient.”
Huawei previously announced that it will invest US$300 million to establish the first public cloud region in Egypt, offering over 200 cloud services including AI platforms, data platforms, and development platforms. To nurture a thriving ecosystem, Huawei will invest US$200 million to support 200 local software partners, to empower 1,300 channel partners and eventually to build a prosperous local software and application ecosystem. In the region, Huawei will invest US$30 million to train 10,000 local developers and educate 100,000 digital professionals, to drive intelligent transformation in the region. To further accelerate ecosystem development, Huawei Cloud announced upgrades to its startup program in Egypt, including an advanced cloud platform, training programs, and business resources. The Huawei Cloud Startup Program assigns dedicated teams to advise on startups’ cloud adoption and subsidizes their cloud consumption. A single startup can apply for cloud credits worth up to $150,000.
Huawei Cloud is the second largest cloud services provider in China, according to research firm Canalys. It has been steadily expanding its global footprint, opening new data centers in Turkey and Saudi Arabia last year and operating a total of 93 availability zones over 33 regions globally.
Huawei Egypt was founded in 2000. Huawei is committed to collaborating with over 350 local partners and enriching the local ecosystem. In terms of supporting ICT talent, the company has set up 90 ICT academies, a flagship “Seeds for the Future” program, and ICT competition. These talent programs have benefited over 35,000 Egyptian ICT talent.
