While progress has been made in developing digital enterprises such as fintechs, Africa’s poor internet connectivity and cloud access challenges limit it to access new digital solutions.

This is according to Roc Bai, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa, who addressed the ongoing Pan African Data Centres conference in Sandton, Johannesburg.

In his keynote talk, +AI (artificial intelligence) , Enable the Future of a Digital Africa, Bai commended African firms' achievement in developing innovative fintech products, but also highlighted the hurdles they confront in increasing access to digital solutions. These include internet service disruptions and difficulties with cloud access.

Bai presented proposals such as "providing cloud infrastructure that will cover the whole continent, creating hybrid solutions that provide reliable data localisation and creating a cloud industry that addresses unique industry needs."

During his presentation, Bai demonstrated the capabilities of Huawei's latest cloud stack offering, as well as GaussDB, Huawei's enterprise-grade distributed database that provides scalable high performance, which he said can fulfill the needs of African enterprises.

He also demonstrated Huawei AI capabilities using its Pangu AI models, which can deliver industry-specific solutions in mining, smart city management, and accurate weather forecasting.

“In the AI era, Huawei will continue to work with our customers and ecosystem partners to explore sustainable development. This will help customers grow their technological capacity, and innovate to find solutions to pressing challenges,” Bai said.

Huawei sees itself playing a critical role in Africa laying the groundwork for secure and dependable computing power in the intelligent computing age.

Bai concluded by saying as African industries embrace AI, Huawei can ensure that smart green technologies are available to power the digital economy.