Before there was Gen AI, there was Pangu. Back in 2021, Huawei first launched the Pangu AI model as part of a Cloud AI strategy. It was introduced as a large-scale pre-trained AI model aimed at enterprise, in effect becoming one of China’s first major AI foundation models.
The following year it was refined for industry-specific use in sectors like finance, health and, in its most fascinating iteration, meteorology: it brought an astonishing level of intelligence to weather forecasting.
Over the next two years, its capabilities were expanded to natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and cloud-based services, targeting business automation and smart manufacturing.
At this week’s Huawei Cloud Summit, on the eve of Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, it became clear that the migration of Pangu to the cloud had been completed. Under the theme “Accelerate intelligence, amplify success”, Huawei Cloud unveiled cutting-edge services and solutions that gave voice to a philosophy it describes as “AI for Industries”.
Under this banner, Pangu models are now adopted in over 30 industries across 400 use cases, including public services, finance, manufacturing, drug discovery, mining, steel manufacturing, railways, autonomous driving, industrial design, and architectural design.
One of the most revealing case studies presented in Barcelona was the use of robots, powered by Pangu models, that can accurately inspect 32,000 items on a high-speed train. For every one of those items, the system, can check for more than 350 complex fault conditions in eight categories.
Why on a train?
Well, that helps high-speed railways improve operational efficiency and cut labour costs, especially with manual tasks that have to be conducted in the early morning. Imagine the savings on strong coffee!
Then there is the Pangu Steel Manufacturing Model, which has been deployed at one of state-owned iron and steel company Baowu Group’s hot rolling production lines. It quickly and accurately predicts optimal settings for the production lines, as well as critical quality metrics, improving the yield rate of steel plates.
Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and sales service, said that Huawei Cloud always put AI as the company’s core strategy. By transitioning from cloud-native to AI-native, she said, Huawei Cloud led the industry with “non-stop innovation”.
She told the audience that Huawei Cloud defined AI-native in two sectors: “AI for Cloud”, which means they reshape and upgrade all Huawei Cloud services into intelligent ones using AI; and “Cloud for AI”, where Huawei Cloud aims to build the best platform to accelerate the development of AI.
At the Summit, Huawei Cloud and its partners unveiled over 20 joint solutions catering to industries such as finance, automotive, retail, media, and public services. These included (information provided by Huawei):
CloudDC Solution provides one-stop data center-to-cloud services, boosting three major capabilities: deterministic operations, cloud DC, and full-stack AI.
Enterprise IT Cloud Migration Solution offers over 240 cloud services, backed by unified O&M services, flexible billing options, and professional services for cloud migration and more to smooth cloud migration.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Continuity Center Solution ensures seamless continuity across multiple layers, including management, application, host, and storage, as well as cloud data centers. It provides comprehensive coverage for three critical scenarios: cloud native backup and DR, IDC-to-cloud backup and DR, and cross-cloud DR. With advanced backup and DR capabilities, such as risk detection within seconds, rapid backup and recovery, and centralized management, this solution empowers businesses to create highly available architectures and safeguard their core data and applications.
Large Model Security Solution is an end-to-end solution that covers environment security, LLM corpus security and compliance, inference security and compliance, and unified security operations.
Cloud Multilayer Ransomware Protection Solution provides comprehensive ransomware protection against intrusions, attack spread, leakages, and tampering to defend against ransomware attacks all round.
GaussDB and TaurusDB: GaussDB’s innovative three-layer pooling architecture enables layered and on-demand resource scaling, while its intra-city dual-cluster disaster recovery capability isolates software and hardware faults between clusters. The AI DevOps assistant automates 90% of fault diagnosis and rectification. TaurusDB, fully compatible with MySQL, requires zero refactoring for business system migration. Featuring AI-based serverless capabilities, TaurusDB is also the only serverless cloud service that supports write scaling.
AI Cloud Service, compatible with more than 100 mainstream models including DeepSeek and Llama, supports efficient, uninterrupted training of foundation models for up to 40 days and quickly rectifies faults within 10 minutes.
Cloud Search Service (CSS) – KooSearch: CSS offers a high-performance platform for searching and analyzing logs, able to handle hundreds of millions of search requests in milliseconds, a powerful service facilitating data-driven O&M and operations. KooSearch is a comprehensive knowledge chat solution with over 90.9% search accuracy, speeding up data monetization efforts.
Cloud Device, providing KooPhone, KooDrive, Cloud Gaming, Cloud STB, and Cloud PC, leverages boundless cloud compute and storage to overcome device limitations, paving the way to everything cloud-enabled. KooVehicle, an intelligent vehicle-cloud synergy solution, enables 24/7 secure, autonomous driving in open-pit mines under different circumstances, achieving significant efficiency and safety gains.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky on @art2gee.bsky.social.
