Huawei Unveils "AI Foundry" for Industries at MWC26

The "Industry AI Foundry" is built upon Huawei's Pangu large models, which are designed specifically for industrial applications rather than general-purpose chat. The latest iteration, Pangu 5.5, features a 718-billion parameter model and has already been deployed in over 500 scenarios across more than 30 industries, including manufacturing, mining, and healthcare. For example, it's used to detect sub-millimeter cracks in oil pipelines and has been adopted by China National Petroleum Corporation. This initiative is a core part of a broader "AI-Native" framework Huawei is pushing, which also includes a new generation of intelligent operations solutions for the telecom industry. The framework, developed over the past year with global operators, focuses on using digital twins and "agentic operations" to blend human expertise with digital employees. This push into AI-driven operations is a direct attempt to reshape the telecom operations market. Alongside the AI Foundry, Huawei launched its next-generation hybrid cloud, Huawei Cloud Foundation (HCF). Announced by Antonony Gu, President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud, HCF is designed to help enterprises manage complex IT environments by balancing on-premise security and compliance with the agility of public cloud services. To date, Huawei's hybrid cloud solutions serve over 5,500 customers in more than 160 countries. The announcements signal a major focus on ecosystem and partner-led growth. In early 2026, the company established a three-year strategy to avoid direct profit competition with its partners, a move aimed at providing stability. This strategy, detailed by Charles Yang, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, includes an upgraded incentive framework and a larger Market Development Fund to drive partner profitability. The company's partner business grew by over 50% in 2025. Underpinning these software and service initiatives is a continued investment in hardware and data center infrastructure. Huawei is actively scaling its AI-ready data center platforms, built around its CloudMatrix384 AI super-node, to handle the increasing demand for AI workloads. This focus on the full stack, from hardware to industry-specific models, is central to Huawei's strategy to create what it calls the "public power grid" for the AI era, as stated by Tim Tao, President of Huawei Cloud Solution Sales. Also at MWC, Huawei showcased CodeArts, an AI-powered coding agent, and announced an open-source project for its A2A-T (Agent-to-Agent for Telecom) protocol. The A2A-T initiative aims to create a unified standard for how AI agents from different vendors communicate within telecom networks, potentially reducing system integration cycles from months to days. This aligns with the industry-wide push toward "agentic networks" and more autonomous operations.