Huawei said it upgraded its Xinghe enterprise and data center networking architecture to support deployments across Southern Africa.
Announced at the vendor’s Network Summit 2026 in South Africa, Huawei’s Intelligent Network Solution portfolio contains a slew of products like a data center network fabric and a converged wide-area network (WAN) offering. At its Africa-centric event, Huawei said its Xinghe “upgrade” provides capabilities to support AI and distributed agent workloads.
South Africa ranks as the highest nation on the continent for AI usage, per Microsoft figures, followed by neighboring Namibia. Africa as a whole severely lags behind the rest of the world in terms of AI usage among the world’s working-age population, though market penetration is still expected to soar. Mordor Intelligence projects the South African AI data center market alone to grow from $99.37 million in 2026 to $572.63 million by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 41.95%.
Huawei’s Southern Africa upgrades for its Xinghe portfolio then look to provide the network foundation to support that anticipated growth.
“Johannesburg is a vibrant city rich in opportunities, connecting talent, industries, and cultures across Africa,” said Vincent Chen, Huawei’s VP of enterprise business for the Southern Africa Region. “Today, AI is becoming a key driver of global innovation, and its adoption in Africa is transitioning from pilot exploration to real-world deployment, accelerating intelligent transformation across sectors such as finance, education, and public services.
“For the Southern African market, Huawei's goal is to advance all intelligence across industries by collaborating with industry partners to build intelligent, secure, and reliable network infrastructure for the AI era.”
Central to its Xinghe solution upgrade was to cater to exploding AI agent adoption, with Huawei warning that rapid usage places unprecedented technical demands on networks.
“Real-time AI interaction, multidimensional data flow, core business security, and other scenarios are driving networks to embrace an AI-centric paradigm shift,” said Leon Wang, president of Huawei's data communication product line. “This marks a transition from ubiquitous ultra-broadband into a new journey defined by lossless computing power, integrated communication and sensing, full-scope security, and network autonomy.”
In addition to network product updates, Huawei also revealed it’s bringing its improvements to its cloud-managed network operations tool, the Xinghe AI CloudCampus SaaS platform, to the region.
Its pay-as-you-grow subscription model allows operators in Southern Africa to support bulk branch network configuration and deployments without heavy upfront capital expenditure. A built-in copilot performs automated network resiliency management, with Huawei claiming it is capable of identifying and resolving around 80% of common network issues.
“In the past, intelligent operations and maintenance was a luxury exclusive to large enterprises. Now, we have deeply integrated AI into the cloud management service platform, enabling SMEs to easily access these capabilities as a cloud service,” said Shi Lei, VP of network cloud engine (NCE) for Huawei's Data Communication product line. “This is more than tech inclusion; it is about making AI network services genuinely accessible, affordable, and actionable.”
The Africa-focused updates follow the launch of an agentic AI security tool for Huawei's Xinghe platform.
Unveiled in April, the aptly named Agentic Security Operations Center (SOC) automatically aggregates data from across network switches, firewalls, and routers, with the compiled information fed into a unified knowledge graph that allows the AI to sift through logs from across multiple network layers.