China’s Huawei will build two data Centres in South Africa from March, it said, as part of plans to expand cloud services across Africa.

“The company is working with South African partners for the construction of the data centres in Johannesburg
initially and later Cape Town,” Huawei said in a statement.

Its cloud service will be available to organisations in South Africa as well as neighbouring countries, it said.

The Chinese firm, at the centre of global security concerns, will challenge Amazon.com Inc, which is also expanding
its presence in the emerging tech hub of Cape Town in a challenge against cloud computing rival Microsoft Corp.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the global leader in cloud computing.

In the last quarter of 2018 AWS’s revenue grew 46 per cent to 7 billion dollars while Microsoft’s grew 76 per cent
to 4 billion dollars to remain in second place, data from research firm Canalys showed. (Reuters/NAN)