Artificial intelligence (AI) has swiftly emerged as a game changer in digital transformation and cloud services, with a broad spectrum of use cases across industries at all levels, from the front office to the backend. But for AI to truly thrive – and for enterprises to gain the most benefits from it – a vibrant partner-driven ecosystem that can maintain a competitive edge and ensure sustainable development is absolutely critical.
That was the key message at Huawei Cloud’s 2025 Asia Pacific Partner Conference in Phuket on May 9. Under the theme "Go Together, Grow Together", the conference assembled over 500 partners from more than 10 countries and regions across Asia-Pacific to discuss development of an AI ecosystem that will be the defining force that shapes the future of the ‘intelligent world’ – and how Huawei Cloud aims to be a key partner in building that ecosystem.
For a start, Huawei Cloud already has an ecosystem via its localised partnership model. Huawei Cloud currently collaborates with over 2,500 local partners in Asia Pacific alone, with partner revenue seeing a substantial 75% increase in 2024. With five Regions and 18 availability zones across Asia-Pacific offering latencies as low as 50ms, Huawei Cloud says its overall business scale in the region has grown thirtyfold in the past five years, positioning the company as the fastest-growing cloud service provider in Asia Pacific.
"Huawei Cloud has always recognised the power of a strong ecosystem,” said Sunny Shang, President of Huawei Cloud Asia Pacific, in his morning keynote. “Our partners are the core driving force behind our sustained growth.”
That will also be the case with AI, said Jacqueline Shi (pictured, above), President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, who emphasised Huawei Cloud's commitment to collaborating with partners to capitalize on strategic AI opportunities in Asia Pacific.
To that end, she said, Huawei Cloud is enhancing the competitiveness of AI by diving deeper into key industry sectors to help partners expand their market reach and meet growing demand for accelerated AI deployments.
“Huawei Cloud will work closely with partners to co-develop industry-specific solutions and explore high-value application scenarios to drive new growth via precise alignment with customer needs,” she said.
AI-native cloud
As for what Huawei Cloud brings to the table for AI development, Joy Huang, President of Huawei Cloud Strategy and Industry Development, outlined the company’s "Cloud for AI" and "AI for Cloud" strategy that aims to build AI-native cloud services and spearhead intelligent upgrades.
That strategy comprises six fundamental capabilities Huawei Cloud offers to support customers' intelligent transformation as well as a thriving partner ecosystem:
- High-quality, secure, and stable cloud services
- Its ‘KooVerse’ global cloud infrastructure
- Cloud-native and AI-ready infrastructure
- Enabling a vast range of AI models and reshape industries (e.g. Huawei Cloud supports 100+ mainstream AI models, with DeepSeek currently the most popular)
- Data-AI convergence based on a knowledge lake (a data lake that is knowledge-centric and includes models, semantics, graphs and expert experience)
- Seamless synergy between the cloud, network and devices.
William Fang, Huawei Cloud Chief Product Officer, explained how Huawei Cloud is reshaping cloud infrastructure through full-stack innovation with its AI-native cloud.
For example, to address the demands of massive computing power, Huawei Cloud offers AI-native infrastructure, as well as AI-native storage, and distributed cloud solutions for diverse scenarios. Meanwhile, Huawei Cloud is integrating its Pangu multimodal large language models (LLMs) with specialised expertise and data across product R&D, data governance, security and service O&M.
At the conference, Huawei Cloud introduced its APAC AI Pioneer Plan to foster AI technology innovation and solution development in collaboration with ecosystem partners.
“These innovations are designed to enable enterprises to seamlessly incorporate AI technologies into their core business processes,” Fang said.
All of this is underpinned by Huawei Cloud’s AI computing centres in Asia Pacific, which empowers enterprises in the region to develop and scale their AI services natively on the cloud.
Building the AI ecosystem
However, as Huawei Cloud speakers repeatedly emphasised throughout the day, the AI ecosystem’s the thing.
Ken Kang, President of Huawei Cloud Global Ecosystem, said that Huawei Cloud's long-term investments in core technologies and ecosystem-building are focused on creating an open, full-stack ecosystem encompassing everything from model development to application implementation around AI cloud services.
“Our aim is to empower partners with differentiated competitiveness, drive cross-industry AI applications, and unlock significant growth potential,” he said.
Dale Chen (main picture, sixth), Director of Huawei Cloud Asia Pacific Cloud Sales Partner Development, went into more detail on Huawei Cloud's Asia Pacific partner strategy, which centres on two key priorities, starting with deepening joint innovation with key industries such as Internet, finance, and carriers to establish a regional industry ecosystem alliance and cultivate a robust industry developer ecosystem.
To expedite that, Huawei Cloud launched its Industry Deep-Dive Initiative, in which it committed to collaborating with partners in those three sectors to construct “an open, collaborative, and sustainable digital ecosystem, deeply exploring industry value through scenario-specific innovation and achieving a comprehensive upgrade of customer service capabilities.”
Huawei Cloud’s another priority, said Chen, is to enhance its partner sales acceleration program through four key initiatives: precision marketing, partner-centric GTM, TAM support, and fostering a healthy market environment, thereby systematically improving partners' service delivery capabilities and unlocking new growth opportunities.
The new Partner Sales Acceleration Program 2.0 initiative – launched onstage by Sunny Shang – provides support across three key pillars: technological innovation, capability enhancement, and resource sharing.
Jet Liu, Vice President of Public Cloud Business Department at Huawei Cloud, addressed one of the key issues facing SMEs (which account for the majority of Huawei Cloud’s customer base) when it comes to implementing AI: it’s not easy, especially if your organisation lacks the expertise or experience in training AI models.
To help SMEs overcome that barrier to the AI ecosystem, Huawei Cloud has launched an all-scenario LLM solution that combines its Flexus X product for SMEs with its Dify LLM to help customers deploy and train DeepSeek easily.
“This also makes Dify work faster,” Liu explained. “That means SMBs can start using Dify and start building their own AI applications straight out of the box.”
