Over the past few years, observers have seen how Huawei was making its transition. The Chinese company wanted to move from being a telecom device manufacturer to a service provider, and in particular developed its own artificial intelligence research division. However, after 14 months, Huawei finally announced the restructuring of this business group dedicated to AI and cloud.

The Chinese company launched its cloud strategy more than 10 years ago and in 2017 introduced a unit to expand into the cloud services market. Huawei currently relies on a few core business segments, including one focused on operator networks, another focused on enterprises, and a third on consumer products. With this, Huawei Cloud has become the second largest cloud service provider in China, but well behind Alibaba Cloud controlling 40.3% of the market.

While these results seem satisfactory, several reports indicate that Huawei still lags behind its competitors due to its late entry into the market. For this reason, the group’s activities will now be divided into two units: the cloud business unit will now be separated from the artificial intelligence unit.

Zhang Pingan has been appointed president of the cloud business unit and Richard Yu, former president of the cloud business unit, will remain president of the artificial intelligence business unit, which was previously linked to the cloud business unit. In addition, the hardware and server storage operations that were the responsibility of the AI and cloud business unit will now be handled by Huawei’s Internet Products and Solutions department, which will be responsible for research and development.

Translated from Focus sur Huawei : la société chinoise restructure ses activités dédiés à l’IA et au cloud