"Today, every industry must embrace AI. We must possess robust AI computing power. Huawei Cloud is committed to embedding technology at its core, cultivating fertile ground for AI computing, driving innovation in intelligent applications across industries, collaborating with partners to build a core technology ecosystem, and collectively accelerating the intelligence of thousands of industries." On March 15th, at the 2024 Huawei Cloud & Huawei Terminal Cloud Innovation Summit, Zhang Ping'an, Executive Director and CEO of Huawei Cloud, stated.
On June 3, 2021, Zhang Ping'an first proposed the "Cloud-Cloud Collaboration" strategy, which deeply integrates the infrastructure foundation, Huawei Cloud, and the mobile application ecosystem, Huawei Terminal Cloud Services, to provide developers and partners with unified services and experiences.
By 2024, with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, "Cloud-Cloud Collaboration" has entered a new stage: the deep collaboration between HarmonyOS and Ascend Cloud will break through the bottleneck of computing power and AI capabilities, bringing faster, stronger, and more reliable intelligent development experiences to enterprises within the HarmonyOS ecosystem.
HarmonyOS enables multi-end deployment with one-time development, making application development more efficient, while Ascend AI Cloud Services are available on-demand, providing a full-chain cloud toolchain for rapidly deploying diverse applications. The system-level AI capabilities of Ascend Cloud are integrated into the HarmonyOS system, enabling HarmonyOS applications to be born intelligent and powered by powerful cloud computing capabilities. The new HarmonyOS operating system boasts native security capabilities and a novel privacy protection mechanism. Coupled with Ascend Cloud's full-stack autonomy and Huawei Cloud's comprehensive security system, the development environment for native intelligence becomes more stable and reliable.
As of now, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has reached a staggering 800 million devices (as of early 2024), spanning smartphones, PCs, tablets, smart screens, in-car systems, and other high-frequency terminal devices. Thousands of enterprises and institutions have embarked on native app development for HarmonyOS, with heavy hitters like Alipay, Taobao, Meituan, JD.com, DingTalk, Gaode Maps, and Xiaohongshu leading the charge. In the future, applications across various industries will undergo an intelligent transformation on the AI innovation ecosystem jointly developed by HarmonyOS and Ascend Cloud.
HarmonyOS lays the foundation for native intelligent app development
Zhu Yonggang, President of Huawei's Terminal Cloud, stated in his address that the synergy between cloud and AI has unleashed tremendous industrial vitality, with Huawei Cloud serving as the fertile ground for our endeavors, continuously providing computing power for the HarmonyOS ecosystem.
Zhu Yonggang mentioned that the brand-new HarmonyOS ecosystem embodies a series of new features such as distributed capability, full-scenario adaptation, and native intelligence. This will ignite fresh innovation focus and vitality for future service ecosystems and content ecosystems, fostering new innovative experiences. HarmonyOS is not merely an operating system but a brand-new ecosystem, a future world brimming with endless possibilities. The massive scale of 800 million full-scenario devices will provide a solid foundation for the synergy between Huawei Cloud and Huawei Terminal Cloud in terms of capabilities and ecosystem, enabling our diverse services to efficiently reach a broader user base and bring more growth opportunities to partners across various industries.
"HarmonyOS is the world's first operating system to seamlessly connect hardware and scenarios, supporting diverse interactions and free flow across all scenarios. The crucial feature of developing once and deploying across multiple ends allows applications to achieve continuous access to services in areas such as tablets, PCs, smart screens, TVs, smartwatches, smart car systems, and more in the future, while also reducing developer costs. This presents new opportunities for commercial returns with just one development effort across multiple devices," Zhu Yonggang remarked.
Intelligence is a major highlight of the HarmonyOS operating system. By sinking Huawei's AI capabilities to the operating system level and empowering over 15 subsystems, HarmonyOS has built a native intelligent foundation. In the future, native AI capabilities can be realized on the terminal side, further enhancing service distribution efficiency and providing consumers with a completely new experience.
The application of the Panggu Big Model further enhances the system's understanding and matching capabilities of users' high-level intents, helping developers more accurately reach target users, thus optimizing user experience and application efficiency.
HarmonyOS also offers seamless integration of AI control capabilities, making the development of intelligent applications more efficient. With just one line of code, developers can access system-level native AI capabilities, lowering the development threshold and ensuring users receive a consistent AI interaction experience across different applications.
Zhu Yonggang revealed that in the fourth quarter of this year, HarmonyOS NEXT, the commercial version of HarmonyOS Galaxy Edition for consumers, will be released. By the end of the year, HarmonyOS aims to achieve the development of over 5,000 native HarmonyOS applications, eventually reaching over 500,000 native applications. He emphasized that the world of HarmonyOS is open, and the opportunities of HarmonyOS are shared. Every partner is a co-creator of the HarmonyOS ecosystem and can join the ecosystem in various forms. We hope to embark on a new ecological path together with our partners!
Huawei Cloud is committed to creating fertile ground for Chinese AI computing power.
Regarding overseas expansion, AI, and ecosystem, Shi Jilin, Global Marketing and Sales Services President of Huawei Cloud, shared, "We aim to achieve a leap in the overseas business development of Chinese enterprises through the construction of a deep-sea strategy, a leap in AI commercialization driven by large models, and a leap in ecosystem construction centered around HarmonyOS."
In China, the scarcity and expense of computing power have become the biggest constraints on intelligent innovation, especially for the development of AI applications across various industries. Cloud-based computing power, as an efficient, flexible, and scalable solution, is gradually becoming the preferred option to overcome the bottleneck of computing power. Ascend Cloud, as the only full-stack autonomous AI cloud computing infrastructure in China, not only provides strong support for the HarmonyOS ecosystem but also fuels the diverse development needs across various sectors.
Ascend Cloud offers powerful, efficient, and instantly deployable intelligent computing resources. Enterprise users can easily access the three major AI computing centers in Gui'an, Wulanchabu, and Wuhu, along with over 30 sub-nodes. Each data center can provide immense computing power of hundreds of EFLOPS, capable of handling models with trillions of parameters. With the ability to use thousands of cards for computation in a single job and handle data scales of up to hundreds of PB for large-scale training, Ascend Cloud ensures seamless scalability and performance.
The instant deployability of Ascend Cloud means that enterprises no longer need to build or modify their data centers or invest in general AI technologies, significantly reducing costs. For example, the fully optimized stack based on distributed engine architecture and the three-layer acceleration of training inference data caching can improve the cost-effectiveness of unit computing power by 30%. Additionally, multi-cloud deployment and the collaborative management of cloud and on-premise computing power enable rapid elastic scaling, resulting in a 50% cost reduction.
Ascend Cloud also boasts an efficient and user-friendly full-stack platform capability. It integrates comprehensive services ranging from cloud-based computing power, model development, and hosting to ecosystem support. Users can choose different service modes according to their needs, achieving integration of training and inference. In addition to Ascend Cloud, Huawei Cloud also provides full-stack AI cloud capabilities including Panggu large models and ModelArts, offering end-to-end support for enterprise users from data processing and model training to application deployment.
Ascend Cloud has significant advantages in large-scale training. With end-to-end quality management and online assurance combined with a cloud-native operations and maintenance system, it can provide 24/7 cloud-based operation services. This deterministic operation ensures a failure rate of less than 5‰ for jobs, even during 30 days of uninterrupted training using thousands of cards, maintaining stability throughout.
Zhang Ping'an stated that Huawei Cloud aspires to create a brand new core technology ecosystem, providing core technical support for all developers and innovators in China. By building this core technology ecosystem, Chinese AI innovation can take root, flourish, and thrive.
