Huawei Cloud will grant cloud credits worth $10 million to 100 Nigerian startups as it attempts to empower the country’s startups to innovate and grow on Huawei Cloud. The investment will be over a two year period.
The company announced on Wednesday at the Huawei Cloud Startup Summit in Lagos where it hosted startups from the Nigerian tech ecosystem. Startups in the program will be able to access cloud credits of up to $150,000 each and be part of a global cloud ecosystem that exposes their businesses to potential clients and investors in 177 countries. Huawei Cloud has over 50 hubs around the world.
“The cloud investment is targeting the startup ecosystem in Nigeria. Huawei Cloud is a global cloud vendor,” said Hugo Hu, director, Huawei Cloud Nigeria.
The company said it plans to reduce the cost of cloud services by 40% for startups in Nigeria.
Huawei is counting on the growing attractiveness of startups in the country to investors which has seen the country ranked consistently among the top four countries in Africa that receives the most investments. Also, demand for cloud services has significantly grown since COVID-19 when many companies had to go digital.
Dotun Adekunle, senior vice president, Flutterwave said the growth in demand is because companies have realised that being on the cloud allows them to compete with other companies anywhere in the world.
“We wouldn’t run Flutterwave efficiently without being on the cloud,” Adekunle said.
Huawei Cloud has a target to onboard 10,000 startups globally by 2025. It has onboarded over 3000 startups, some of which are in Africa.
According to the Ecosystem Director of Huawei Cloud Nigeria, Paul Adigu, three key initiatives will be leveraged to achieve the startups’ program objectives — advanced cloud platform, startup talent development, and provision of business resources.
Huawei has been part of Nigeria’s digital transformation and will be looking to deepen its footprint with the cloud business. The company said Huawei Cloud aims to build a cloud foundation for an intelligent world leveraging the concept of “Everything as a Service”. A local cloud will be launched in Nigeria in 2024, and as of now, Huawei Cloud has built 88 AZs in 30 Regions around the world.
