Huawei charts new way forward for data centre facility channel partners in SA

Huawei this week further cemented South Africa’s reputation as a leading destination for data centres on the African continent, announcing new updates to its data centre facility channel partnership plan. These updates will improve continuity between Huawei Digital Power and its distributors and partners, focusing on the key areas of protection, profitability, simplicity and growth.

Speaking at the Huawei Data Centre Facility Ecosystem Strategy Launch this week, Xia Hesheng, President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa’s Digital Power Business, highlighted the growing importance of data centres, pointing out that in the coming decades, we can expect to see 10 times growth in general computing and 500 times growth in AI computing power. Data centres will be critical to achieving that growth.

“The accelerated demands for decarbonisation, digitisation and intelligence will stimulate the explosive growth of data and computing power as the core foundation of the digital economy, fuelling demand for data centres,” he said. “Global energy uncertainty, meanwhile, will intensify demand for critical power supply systems. Both mega-trends indicate huge potential opportunities in the data centre and critical power supply businesses. Huawei is committed to building a fair and growing ecosystem with its partners to embrace these opportunities.”

Coming at a time when South Africa is establishing itself as the pre-eminent destination for data centres on the African continent, Huawei’s updated plan aims to help more potential partners play a meaningful role in the sector’s growth. It will do so by lowering entry barriers for partners, as well as redefining Huawei Digital Power’s certification requirements to fit the talents of its partners more accurately. In its new form, the plan also establishes new incentive and protection rules to ensure shared benefits for all parties and to guarantee fairness.

Huawei recently launched the latest version of its smart DC modular hitting PPUE lower than 1.2, micro range UPS, which has extremely high reliability and efficiency ratings.

Ultimately, Huawei hopes to use the updated policy to better collaborate with its local partners and drive continuous technical innovation to build an open, vigorous and benefit-sharing ecosystem. Huawei also emphasised the importance of forging relationships with like-minded partners to realise opportunities in a carbon-neutral era, continuously innovate, improve capabilities and collectively lead the overall development of the data centre industry.