Chinese networking giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is teaming up with Microsoft Corp. in an effort to grab a bigger share of the public cloud market in its home nation.

The new partnership will see Huawei host more of Microsoft’s services on its public cloud. Huawei announced the expanded partnership on Tuesday at an event in Shanghai. It follows the launch of Huawei’s nascent public cloud service last April, when it announced support for Microsoft’s Windows Server and Relational Database Service for SQL Server.

As well as helping Huawei in its bid for a bigger piece of China’s public cloud market, the partnership should also be beneficial to Microsoft as it helps increase its foothold there by offering more of its applications and services to Chinese companies. “The fourth industrial revolution, driven by technology innovation, is creating opportunities for customers to achieve more across nearly every industry,” said Alain Crozier, chief executive officer of Microsoft China.

China’s public cloud market is currently dominated by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud computing arm Alibaba Cloud, followed by Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. U.S. firms such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services Inc., meanwhile, have been forced to take a back seat, as local regulations mean they can only deliver their cloud services through local subsidiaries.

“It’s an interesting move by Microsoft,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. The analyst offered some background, noting that western firms’ infrastructure as a service build-out in China is lagging behind that of local players, and so partnerships such as this one are clearly becoming more necessary.

“It’s a unique opportunity as its key western world competitors AWS and Google cannot provide their products to any local players,” Mueller continued. “It’s also good news for any Chinese companies that want to use Windows products.”

It’s true that China’s public cloud market is less developed than that of the U.S., but the demand for cloud services is widely expected to surge in the next decade, making it an extremely important battleground for all concerned.

With that in mind, Huawei is stepping up its efforts on a much broader front. In addition to the partnership with Microsoft, Huawei today said it’s working with “cloud alliance” partners BT, DT, Orange and Telefónica to provide additional public cloud services with an artificial intelligence component, both directly and with partners. In addition, it will also provide more infrastructure offerings for its overseas partners, The Register reported.

It’s not immediately clear what this “AI component” will be, as Huawei neglected to provide more details at this stage. Huawei has already built its own Kirin 970 processor chip to enable AI on smartphones, such as in its upcoming Huawei Mate 10 smartphone. That chip is said to come with a dedicated AI processor, though Huawei also said some AI workloads will be offloaded to the cloud.

In addition, Huawei also has an AI research partnership with the University of California at Berkeley, combining Berkeley’s AI Research facility and Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Labs, which are based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. That alliance is focused on several subsets of AI research, including deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision.

Image: Huawei