Skymind AI Berhad, the south-east Asia arm of California-based Skymind, is working with Chinese ICT giant Huawei to develop a cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) hub to foster innovation and talent development in Asean, beginning with Malaysia and Indonesia.
 
An MoU between the companies was signed by Shawn Tan, CEO of Skymind AI, and Lim Chee Siong, vice president of Huawei Cloud in the South Pacific region. The agreement shall see a collaboration between the two companies to develop an AI ecosystem including infrastructure and talent development in the region, as well as boosting the local digital economy development.
 
Skymind and Huawei Cloud will also develop AI training programmes to bolster the local talent pool by enhancing ICT capabilities. 
 
“We are excited to establish this ground-breaking partnership between Skymind and Huawei,” said Tan. “The combined expertise and technical capabilities of the two companies will provide a strong foundation to position south-east Asia as an AI innovation hub. These are also exciting times for Skymind as we continue our international expansion plan. We are developing a strong foothold in the region and this agreement is an important step for us as we further establish our presence in Asia.”
 
As part of the arrangement, both companies will set up a joint working group to develop smart city innovations by providing strategic and technical expertise. The collaboration will begin in Indonesia and the three states in Malaysia of Penang, Kedah and Johor.
 
“Huawei Cloud provides a powerful computing platform and easy-to-use development platform to support Huawei’s full-stack, all-scenario AI strategy,” said Siong. “Through this partnership, we envision Huawei Cloud and AI as the platform enabler in nurturing the local AI developer ecosystem and fostering collaboration with developers, partners, universities and research institutions, with the ultimate goal of making AI more inclusive. In addition to this, Huawei Cloud and AI, coupled with 5G technology, will enable a future of ubiquitous computing and intelligence to deliver the best digital experience in this growing digital sphere ahead of the inevitability of today’s digital wave to realise Digital Malaysia.”
 
Skymind is an enterprise AI company offering an open-core machine-learning platform, commercial support and training for implementing AI. Headquartered in San Francisco, it serves dozens of Fortune 500 companies that use its software to turn their big data stacks into AI stacks. Skymind’s Eclipse Deeplearning4j is said to be the most widely used AI framework for Java and Scala, and serves as a bridge between the Python data science community and big data tools such as Spark and Kafka.
 
Huawei Cloud is Huawei’s signature cloud service brand. It brings together Huawei’s 30-plus years of expertise in ICT infrastructure products in one package so users can build what they need into their profile with building block-like ease.
 
The picture shows the MoU signing ceremony between Skymind and Huawei with, from the left: Tan Kuan Thye, VP of cloud strategy and consulting at Huawei; Roben Wang, president of Huawei Cloud in Apac; Lim Chee Siong; Shawn Tan; Datuk Yasmin Mahmood, advisor at Skymind; and Shoant Teoh, executive director of Skymind.