Huawei Cloud has started offering commercial services in South Africa, according to a statement released by the multinational ICT services provider.

In February 2019 at the ITWeb Cloud Summit 2019 in Bryanston, Johannesburg, the company confirmed its intention to launch 'its first availability zone' for cloud services in March.

Farouk Osman Latib, Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture at Huawei said the company was ready to roll out its service "in some instances through partners and in others via its own datacentre."

Now the company claims to be the world's first cloud service provider with an operational datacentre in Africa.

"...the South African facility complies with Tier 3+ standards and uses Huawei's high-performance chips and network devices to offer a better user experience."

Huawei is leasing a datacentre in Johannesburg from a partner from where it is deploying localised public cloud services based on local industry policies, customer requirements and partner conditions.

Edward Deng, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Business Unit, said South Africa was one of the most diverse and promising emerging markets globally, with tremendous potential, and cloud services are expected to unleash the latent capacity and drive the growth in the country.

"We are looking forward to Huawei Cloud's innovative technologies and services, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence assisting African governments, carriers, and enterprises in a variety of industries such as finance, energy, agriculture, to leapfrog to a fully-connected, intelligent era."

In addition to the Chinese mainland, Europe and Latin America regions, Huawei Cloud had unveiled regions in Hong Kong, Russia, Thailand and Singapore to date.

By the end of 2018, 40 availability zones had been opened in 23 geographic regions, according to the company.

Huawei said it plans to operate more datacentres in "Kenya, Nigeria and other countries" on the continent.