China’s Huawei launches Arabic LLM and new data center in Egypt

Chinese telecom giant Huawei has just launched an Arabic large language model (LLM) based on the company’s Pangu model, along with a new data center in Cairo that the company calls the first public cloud service in Egypt, according to a report in South China Morning Post. 

The move hopes to capitalize on Africa’s rising demand for generative AI.

According to Huawei, the Arabic LLM has been trained using modern standard Arabic and local input to ensure “understanding of the local culture, history, knowledge customs and more of the Arab world", the company said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The company says its LLM will help industries build their own AI in fields ranging from banking to energy. It says its speech recognition capabilities allow it to cover over 20 Arabic-speaking countries. 

The Arabic LLM will be supported by the company's new data center,

which will provide cloud services to 28 African countries including Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria.

Huawei has been operating in Egypt for 25 years.