Huawei's cloud computing unit has grown 21.9 percent Year over Year (YoY) reaching $7.6bn in FY2023.
The recently released 2023 Annual Report shows that the company's overall business grew full-year revenue by 9.6 percent, reaching around $97.3 billion.
The cloud segment was the company's fastest-growing, though still only represented less than a sixth of its ICT infrastructure business, which grew by 2.3 percent for the year.
According to Huawei, the company has worked on more than 800 e-Government cloud projects, helped 160 cities consolidate their digital infrastructure and services into a single platform, and worked with customers including major banks in China, insurance companies, e-commerce, gaming, and automakers in the country.
Details about the company's successes outside of China are more limited, however, it reiterated its 2018 achievement of being the first cloud service provider to operate local data centers in Southern Africa.
Huawei also claims to be the cloud service provider with the most locations in Latin America and government projects in Thailand. In total, Huawei ended the year with a presence in 30 geographical regions with 84 availability zones.
In comparison, AWS operates in 33 regions with 105 availability zones, and saw cloud revenue of $90.8 billion for 2023, Google cloud's Q4 closed with $9.2bn in revenue, while Microsoft saw the quarter generate $25.8bn in revenue.
In a note at the beginning of the Annual Report, Hu Houkun, Huawei's rotating chairman said: "Huawei has built up an extensive range of ICT technologies, and we will continue to invest heavily in R&D while strengthening strategic synergy across hardware, software, chips, devices, networks, and cloud."
Houkun noted that the company has faced "immense challenges" over the last three years, though says it will "continue to innovate based on two core drivers: science and technology, and customer needs. Throughout this time, we have invested over 20 percent of our annual revenue back into R&D to ensure the competitiveness of our products and solutions."
Among those challenges is Huawei's labeling as a "high-risk vendor" by many countries due to its close ties with the Chinese government. The UK and US are among those to have banned Huawei's equipment from its networks.
Earlier this year, Huawei announced plans for a cloud computing region in Egypt. The company is also planning an AI cloud computing center in Hong Kong which would be its first outside mainland China.
