Summary Bullets:

• Huawei aims to accelerate Digital Africa with wider connectivity, 5G, and sustainability.

• Industrial 5G, especially in mining, can drive 5G monetization in Africa. This is supported by Huawei’s broad portfolio and ecosystem.

Huawei held its MBBS Africa in Cape Town, South Africa in November 2025. As one of the leading telecom network vendors, Huawei shared its regional vision – to drive ‘Digital Africa’ through wider connectivity, 5G, and sustainable solutions.

GlobalData’s Africa & Middle East Mobile Broadband Forecast shows that mobile data subscription has been growing steadily at high single-digit rates over the past several years and is expected to rise at a 7.2% CAGR over the next five years. While 5G adoption is increasing, the penetration rate is still low compared to other regions. Huawei highlighted its initiatives and broad capabilities to accelerate growth in Africa. These include multi-band massive MIMO for additional capacity, active antenna solutions for efficient and flexible deployments, FWA for new use cases, cost-efficient solutions for rural deployments, and various energy-saving technologies such as adaptive power backup. Several operators including Telkom SA, Safaricom Kenya, and Airtel Tanzania showcased how they are leveraging these technologies in their networks. Huawei is also transforming its engagement model with African operators, moving beyond the role of a network vendor to become to a digitalization partner by delivering innovative solutions aligned with business needs and monetization strategies.

As 5G deployment gathers pace, monetization will become critical for operators. GlobalData research estimates 5G users will account for 7.1% of all mobile users by the end of 2025 and will grow to 26.7% by 2030. However, 5G monetization remains a global challenge even in advanced markets. The challenge will be an even bigger hurdle for African operators due to slower overall adoption and the relatively lower spending power. This makes the importance of enterprise 5G as a key monetization engine. Horizontal services such as FWA, private 5G, and IoT are essential. These use cases can help enterprises address various needs such as increasing reliability and security for critical applications, agile connectivity for temporary sites (e.g., events, remote operations), SD-WAN underlay, and large-scale IoT deployments. Meanwhile, 5G-enabled industrial solutions represent an even larger opportunity. Mining and resources, one of the region’s largest sectors, can benefit from applications like autonomous drilling, remote operation/maintenance, and worker safety. Globally, 5G adoption in mining is maturing and widely adopted. GlobalData’s 5G & Private Network Deployment Tracker shows that 7% of global deployments are in the mining sector. Other major verticals are construction, tourism, and hospitality are among other major verticals in the region. There is a growing number of use cases including drones and surveillance, digital twins, and safety in construction; and mixed reality, robots, and smart facilities in tourism/hospitality.

While the opportunity for 5G-enabled industrial services is increasing solidly, the solutions are far more complicated. They span across broader ICT stacks and require IT-OT integrations. Nevertheless, this plays to Huawei’s strengths. The vendor has comprehensive portfolio from cellular and fixed networks, to cloud, server, end points, AI, and industrial capabilities. For example, autonomous drilling in mining requires private network, but also edge computing, AI/analytics, and vertical expertise. Besides, the company has wide partner ecosystem including industrial players and end-point manufacturers. And more importantly, Huawei has extensive references and experience delivering these solutions cost-effectively in other emerging markets like Asia and South America. It can showcase its other successful deployments to gain market trust and drive its brand share in the enterprise 5G space.

Summary Bullets:

• AWS Singapore Innovation Hub shows the company’s shift from technology-led to business-driven, turning use cases into commercial applications.

• The F1 partnership showcases AI and cloud innovation, but also AWS’ capabilities with real-time data intensive analytics and insights.

AWS held an analyst day in Singapore, showcasing its Innovation Hub and the partnership with Formula 1 (F1).

AWS Innovation Hub

At the innovation hub, AWS demonstrated a diverse range of AI and cloud enabled use cases – from document analytics and loan processing for BFSI, to preventive maintenance and AI-driven surveillance in manufacturing. The facility also houses many other industry-specific use cases with additional use cases in the pipeline. This initiative reflects AWS’ ongoing shift from a technology-focused to a business-led engagement model. While technologies remain at the core, the company is deepening collaboration with enterprise leaders beyond IT, engaging directly with business executives and functional owners. Leadership, culture, and people are key enablers of successful digital transformation. The Innovation Hub serves as a platform for enterprises to explore and co-develop use cases tailored to their business needs.

Innovation labs are not new. Many other providers like global system integrators, telcos, and tech vendors, have been opening new facilities over the last few years. It is a proven way to drive adoption of emerging technologies through solution co-development, commercialization and ecosystem expansion. Besides, innovation labs can also strengthen providers’ brand share and enable them to gain deeper market knowledge such as understanding customers’ pain points. The use cases demonstrated at the AWS facility were innovative and promising, but most are somewhat comparable to use cases found in other providers’ facilities. But what differentiates AWS is its strong execution. Over 70% of the use cases have been brought into production. This is consistent with its strategy to expand focus on outcome-led engagements, and a strong proof point that the efforts are not just conceptual but outcome-driven.

AWS x F1

In the latter part of the event, there were sessions with executives at the track sites including a visit to the F1 Event Technical Center (ETC), sharing how the AWS and F1 collaboration is driving innovation and enabling various use cases for F1, teams, drivers, fans, and viewers. Since the partnership began in 2018, AWS has evolved from providing core cloud infrastructure to powering advanced AI solutions. Early deployments include leveraging over 1,000 AWS compute cores for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) projects to design race cars. Today, the partnership extends to AI applications including real-time insights, car performance, race strategy, issue resolutions/root cause analysis, fan engagement (e.g., hyper-personalization), game strategy, and safety and reliability.

Sports, as one of the most data-intensive industries in the world, offers an ideal testbed for real-time analytics. For example, an F1 car alone carries around 300 sensors, generating over one million telemetry data points per second with a total of 600TB across entire race. Similarly, a football match generates about 3.6 million data points. Furthermore, data from sports events are often highly fragmented (structured and unstructured) and need to be processed in real-time. Apart from F1, AWS is also an official technology partner in various major global sports events such as the NFL, PGA Tour, Bundesliga, NHL, and many other sports teams. While sports in APAC are not as big as in other regions such as the US and Europe, AWS collaborations with F1 and other sports organizations show its leadership in this industry. More importantly, it can also be seen as a powerful platform to demonstrate its broad capabilities and innovation in complex and data-rich environments.

Summary Bullets:

• Various new capabilities in cloud migration, AI, and agentic AI that are aligned with business needs in APAC.

• This shows strong momentum, but there are a few considerations for AWS to strengthen its position in the region.

In a recent briefing with analysts in APAC, AWS shared its key launches in H1 2025. In line with the market direction, most new services and features are around AI. Cloud adoption is growing while AI is evolving rapidly in the region. The focus has shifted from LLMs and use case creations to efficient deployments and advanced automation. For example, using the right model (third-party, custom model, model distillation, fine-tuning, and SLM) and agentic AI (multi-agent applications and agent development, including support for third-party agents and open-source agent SDK). The new capabilities are crucial for AWS to address the growing customer needs. Businesses have higher awareness of AI and are beginning to feel the push to adopt the technology to keep up with user demands and gain a competitive edge. The new capabilities are also crucial for AWS to retain its market position and to respond to competitors.

Cloud migration: AWS launched Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS) to simplify migration to the AWS’ environment (including AWS Outposts). While AWS’ support for VMware workloads is not new, Amazon EVS enables enterprises to retain VCF architecture (e.g., SDDC manager, vSphere, vSAN, and NSX) while providing deployment flexibility (e.g., self-manage or partners’ managed services and pay-per-use or bring-your-own-subscription models). Besides, AWS also launched AWS Transform, an agentic AI service (in both web-based and IDE), to accelerate VMware migration to EC2. The agent is designed to analyze workloads, dependencies, and readiness; convert VMware networking configurations to AWS; generate plans; and user validation (human in the loop). This can address the growing cloud migration in the region, but also minimize challenges such as enterprises’ integration, vendor lock-in, security, scalability, licensing and costs, and skill gap. Besides, with cloud-native environments, it can also future-proof enterprise workloads through options to refactor, replatform, and even repatriate the applications, which enables businesses to move away from VMware. AWS Transform is also available for mainframe and .NET application modernization.

Agentic AI: Apart from AWS Transform, there are several other new features highlighted by the vendor. AWS introduced Amazon Bedrock Agents by choosing the right models and data to execute specific tasks. The vendor has also added multi-agent collaboration as part of its Amazon Bedrock capabilities to enable management of multiple agents to address complex workflows. AWS is increasingly promoting open-source by adding support for (1) Strands Agent, an open-source agent SDK, and (2) Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for integration across agents as well as data sources and tools. This provides wider flexibility for enterprises to deploy agentic AI, from specialized agents (Amazon Q), to fully managed agents (Amazon Bedrock) and DIY (open-source). This is crucial for enterprises to achieve greater efficiency and scalability, especially when they have implemented multiple agents from various providers for different business processes. Besides, Amazon Q can index data from various third-party sources including Salesforce, Zoom, Google, and Microsoft Exchange.

Other AI capabilities: There are also many other new features and capabilities of Amazon Bedrock including latency-optimized inference, model distillation, and intelligent prompt routing for model optimization, as well as support for new third-party models such as Deepseek, TwelveLabs, and Poolside. Another interesting new capability of Amazon Bedrock is cross-region inference which distributes its GPU capacity within a geographical region. This can provide cost-efficient solutions for enterprises who are developing AI applications that are not latency-sensitive nor bound by data sovereignty requirements. For Amazon Nova (its in-house models), the vendor highlighted Amazon Nova Sonic, a speech-to-speech model that provides higher performance (faster and more accurate) compared to the traditional approach (speech-text-model-text-speech again). It also introduced Amazon Nova Act, a model that allows a human interface (e.g., selecting an option on a web interface).

Conclusion: The new capabilities show AWS’ strong momentum in the rapidly evolving cloud and AI markets. AWS has also demonstrated various customer references with the new capabilities, across multiple industries. However, competitors are also moving at a similar pace. There are still some areas for consideration for AWS to further drive its position in the market. This includes showcasing wider references in APAC, supporting broader AI service availability in new regions in Asia, and AI edge (e.g., Outposts deployment).