To tap into that market, over the next five years the company will invest an additional US$1.5 billion in incentives to expand its developer base from 1.3 million to 5 million to enable Huawei and its worldwide partners to come up with the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions.

Hu said part of the investment will be used to establish an ecosystem for its Kunpeng series of server CPU chips which are aimed at meeting the general computing needs of corporate customers. Huawei is developing the Kunpeng ecosystems in several key Chinese cities including Beijing Shanghai and Nanjing, which have huge potential corporate computing markets.

Huawei says US-China trade deal should lead to talks

Last month, Huawei unveiled a new high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chip for servers, Ascend 910, designed to grow its share of the booming cloud services market. Huawei claims the device is the “world’s most powerful AI processor” targeted at AI model training, which is crucial to Huawei’s future business growth as it sees AI as a general purpose technology that can be used in almost every sector of the economy.

Thousands of Ascend processors are deployed in Huawei’s new Atlas 900 AI computing system, which has set a new world record by taking 59.8 seconds to train ResNet-50, the gold standard for measuring AI training performance, beating the previous world record by 10 seconds.

Hu said Atlas 900 has been used by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organization to process “epic amounts” of data.

“If an astronomer wanted to find a celestial body with specific features in [the Southern Hemisphere] it would take 169 days of full-time work. Atlas 900 was able to scan through mountains of data to locate and identify a specific type of star in only 10 seconds,” Hu said.

Privately-owned Huawei, which was added to Washington’s Entity List in May, preventing it from purchasing US products and services, has stepped up strategic investments and added thousands of researchers in a bid to counter the US ban, company founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said in an interview with The Economist on September 10.

Ren revealed that Huawei was ready to share its 5G technology with potential western buyers in exchange for access to their markets. Further, the company would allow customers to modify the source code so that neither Huawei or the Chinese government could have any control over any telecoms infrastructure built using its equipment.

Hu said on Wednesday that Ren’s offer would enable more competition in the global 5G supply chain which would be good for users and development of the industry. “We also know that there are some doubts about Huawei's 5G solution,” he said, referring to national security concerns raised by the US government. However, Hu said that approaching 5G development as a commercial technology would mitigate these issues. To date the company has secured more than 60 5G contracts worldwide.

Australian government advised India to ban Huawei from 5G

In March the Shenzhen-based company reported a 19.5 per cent jump in annual revenue to 721.2 billion yuan (US$102 billion) for 2018, capping a year in which it came under siege from the US government which sought to block use of the company’s 5G gear in mobile networks around the world.

The consumer business group, which focuses on smartphone and laptop sales, became the biggest contributor to a record revenue for the first time last year, reflecting the gains the Chinese brand has made both at home and abroad amid flat sales in its network equipment business.

While Huawei’s new Mate 30 series of handsets will still run on the Android operating system, the company will not be able to sell these high-end devices with popular Google mobile services, such as Google Play and Google Maps, which are seen as essential services for consumers living outside mainland China.