Huawei Unveils AI-Ready Data Infrastructure To Drive Enterprise Innovation In South Africa

The rise of AI is putting new pressure on infrastructure as organisations reconsider how they store, manage, protect and use data. Against this backdrop, Huawei’s annual IT Day focused on the growing need for intelligent storage and computing.

The event drew more than 400 customers and partners, with Huawei showcasing its latest AI data infrastructure, all-flash storage and virtualisation. The conversation centred on the growing need for closer collaboration as businesses face cyber threats and the demands of AI.

Kui Zheng, CEO of Huawei Enterprise Business Group in South Africa, said this year’s IT Day is built around a critical question: how do organisations future-proof data storage and unlock the true value of data in the AI era?

The question is especially relevant in South Africa, where digital transformation is already driving infrastructure upgrades.

Kui described South Africa as both a key player in the global economy and a pioneer of innovation. “From government to transportation, finance, and energy, we’ve seen South African organisations lead the charge in upgrading ICT infrastructure, accelerating digital transformation, and improving lives.”

He outlined four of the main areas Huawei plans to focus on:

• Data protection to help keep businesses running during cyber threats or infrastructure failures,
• Data centre virtualisation to improve performance while reducing overhead,
• AI computing to unlock new insights and efficiency,
• Smart office tools to support more connected collaboration.

Building AI-ready infrastructure

He said New-Gen OceanStor Dorado is designed to meet those demands by improving performance, supporting SAN, NAS and S3 in one system, and strengthening the security needed for critical enterprise environments.

Clinton George, Solution Architect of Huawei Enterprise Data Centre Solution Department, said Huawei’s answer to modern data centre demands is DCS, which he described as a full stack data centre virtualisation solution.

“More than just a hypervisor, DCS offers easy deployment, unified management, AI, a Big Data platform, and optimised compute-network-storage collaboration — delivering performance, resilience, ransomware protection, backup, and a migration tool that has helped over 1,200 customers in the past two years,” he said.

Huawei also highlighted its Atlas AI computing portfolio, with Allen Ye, Director of Huawei Southern Africa Computing Marketing & Solution Department, focusing on the growing infrastructure demands created by enterprise AI adoption.

He said the rise of AI-native applications and the token economy is driving demand for more computing power. According to Ye, inference demand is expected to grow faster than training over the next five years, catch up this year, and reach 4.5 times last year’s level by 2030.

Huawei showcased scenario-based AI practices currently applied in public services, finance, and electric power industries, and demonstrated how AI can create value based on specific scenarios. AI is used to improve operational efficiency and public satisfaction.

Huawei also showcased Atlas 850E&950 SuperPoD, Next-generation AI computing architecture for larger AI workloads. It can scale to 8,192 NPUs and support trillion-parameter model training, while its interconnection and UnifiedBus technology help ease the bandwidth, latency and bottleneck problems that often come with traditional clusters.

James Kamau Maina, Huawei’s Intelligent Collaboration Solution Architect, presented IdeaHub as the workhorse of the modern meeting room and a key part of the company’s AI Classroom push. Maina said large deployments can be managed through IdeaManager, which handles configuration and diagnostics at scale.

IdeaHub supports wireless projection without requiring devices to be on the same network. Up to 40 devices can be connected at once and nine projecting simultaneously. It also includes eye-protection features.

Real-world application

The programme featured customer and partner success stories, showing how organisations are already using Huawei technologies in real-world environments to modernise operations.

Aadhir Maharaj, Solution Sales Data Centre Specialist at Altron Digital Business, said the partnership between Altron and Huawei focuses on helping South African businesses build stronger technology infrastructure. The partnership, which now spans 14 years, is supported by 91 Huawei engineers across South Africa and has delivered more than R5 billion in project value.

According to Maharaj, that kind of footprint matters at a time when businesses are under growing pressure to turn AI ambition into real operational value.

Lu Peng, Director of the Huawei South Africa Data Center Solution Sales Department, introduced OceanClub, a global non-profit technical community focused on data storage exchange and collaborative problem-solving.

The programme closed with the 2026 OceanClub MVP awards, which recognised South African professionals for their contributions to data infrastructure, innovation and knowledge sharing. The local honourees were Aadhir Maharaj, Michael Khutlane, Laure Le Roux and Gareth Smith.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continue building on its work in the data centre space while working closely with customers and partners to support South Africa’s digital transformation.