Huawei pledges $1.5 billion to its new developer program

Huawei has announced that it will invest $1.5 billion in the next five years to boost its developer ecosystem for the Kunpeng and Ascend computing platforms.

SDKs were also released at the same event when its Developer Program 2.0 was unveiled.The announcement was made at the 2019 version of the Chinese vendor’s annual Huawei Connect event in Shanghai. According to Patrick Zhang, CTO of Cloud & AI Products & Services at Huawei, the new program will cover five key areas:

The focus areas are related to cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The applications and services the ecosystem aims to support are for server level, either in the centralized cloud or on the edge. To enable the ecosystem development, Huawei also published Kunpeng Developer Kit and ModelArts 2.0 AI development platform.

Despite that x86 architecture is still dominating the server market, ARM has worked to break the monopoly, and Huawei is one of ARM’s leading licensees. Earlier this year Huawei released Kunpeng 920, its CPU based on ARMv8 design. Huawei aims to expand its share in the server market with Kunpeng’s superior computing power claimed by Huawei, most likely starting from the market in China.

But Huawei’s ambitions go way beyond moving more boxes. Its cloud service has been promoted for its strong AI capability, supported by the Ascend AI chips. The Ascend 910, the latest version, was released in August, which the company claimed is the world’s most powerful AI processor.

By enriching its ecosystems, Huawei hopes it will be able to deliver a full suite of solutions, including supporting digital transformation undertake by increasing numbers of telecom operators.

This is the second iteration of Huawei’s Developer Program. The Developer Program 1.0 was launched in 2015.