AI technologies are reshaping the industry landscape at an unprecedented speed and have become the engine of enterprise digital transformation. Huawei and carriers are leading this transformation as key players in the digital economy. Decades of practices and exploration have made one thing clear: AI isn't about stacking technologies, but rewiring business logic. Carriers are transforming from traditional connectivity providers to full-stack service partners and partners in value creation for enterprises in the AI era, using their established network and computing infrastructure together with sales channels that reach every corner of the market. Huawei's view is clear: AItoB will be the engine of carriers' B2B growth over the next decade, and a trillion-yuan market is taking shape.
Reading the trends: AI is sweeping the globe, and computing demand is growing exponentially
Breakthroughs in AI are pushing industries worldwide into a phase of deep restructuring, marked by explosive data growth, soaring computing demand, and rapid AI adoption across sectors. Three dimensions help explain the commercial logic behind this shift.
Data: AI is igniting a revolution in global data production and circulation
AI is transforming how data is produced and moved, turning it from a static asset into dynamic fuel for computing. According to China's National Data Bureau, token calls grew literally more than a thousandfold in two years, from 100 billion in 2024 to 140 trillion in 2026. Industry estimates put global data generation at over 220 ZB in 2025, with more than 80% coming from enterprise production, operations, and services. This industrial-grade data embedded in vertical sectors serves as high-quality "fuel" for AI model training and inference. For carriers, the ability to efficiently transmit, store, and process this data is the key to breaking into the AItoB market.
Computing power: From linear to exponential growth
AI is moving from the lab into real-world industry applications, and the nature of computing consumption is changing. In the IT era, computing demand grew mostly linearly. In AItoB scenarios, demand increases exponentially. As applications scale, inference demand in particular is rising fast. Generating a single intelligent analysis report, a piece of video, or an interactive session consumes dozens to hundreds of times more computing power than standard office software. Global AI computing demand is now growing at over 200% annually, with inference expected to account for more than 70% of total growth. Whoever can deliver stable, elastic, cost-effective computing-network services close to end users will gain a decisive edge in the AItoB market. Carriers' equipment rooms and network nodes, spread across various locations, are natural ground for meeting this demand for near-user inference.
Market space: AI-driven digital transformation is unlocking significant commercial value
From a macroeconomic perspective, AI-driven enterprise digital transformation is creating a large-scale monetization cycle. Industry projections suggest Chinese carriers' digital service revenue in vertical industries will exceed CNY230 billion by 2027 and surpass CNY880 billion by 2030. AI-related services are predicted to account for over 40% of this growth, becoming the largest revenue source in the B2B sector. The market today is polarized and application-based: Large enterprises (LEs) want deeply customized, full-stack solutions that rework their production processes; SMEs show fragmented demand, prioritize affordability, and expect quick results. Traditional carrier business scenarios such as education, healthcare, retail, and small- and mid-scale manufacturing will be the first to see AI services deployed. This is where the carrier AItoB push will play out.
Building market depth: A dual-engine strategy driving SME and LE market breakthroughs
Faced with divergent market demands, carriers have joined forces with Huawei, leveraging their respective resource strengths to formulate a precise dual-engine strategy. On one front, standardized and scalable off-the-shelf services including standardized industry solutions are driving rapid coverage and penetration in the SME market. On the other, sustained deep engagement in large-enterprise (LE) production flows, delivered through highly customized solutions with high barriers to entry, is forming a lasting competitive bulwark. This coordinated strategy allows both parties to stake out a clear position in the AItoB market and capture maximum value.
SME market: Standardized services + scenario-based solutions build a new inclusive AI ecosystem
SMEs form the foundation of a national economy. In China, over 64 million SMEs contribute more than 50% of GDP and over 80% of urban employment. These enterprises are the bedrock of the AItoB market. Yet they face a persistent digital divide in their intelligent transformation journey. Their needs are highly fragmented. They are price-sensitive. They require services that are lightweight and easy to deploy. The core pain point is simple: They want to transform, but they lack capital, technical expertise, and talent.
To address these challenges, Huawei and carriers have unified the industry applications of education, healthcare, retail, catering, logistics under a shared framework of SME market planning. The result is an inclusive AI service system built around standardized AI products, industry-specific solutions, and one-stop service delivery.
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Standardized products: Huawei has worked with ecosystem partners to help carriers build standardized product portfolios, such as vision AI services, NLP-based office productivity tools, and AI-powered security. These products are available via on-demand subscription, with monthly billing and elastic resources, which dramatically lowers the barriers to AI adoption for SME.
For chain stores, for example, carriers now offer an integrated package combining private lines, networking, and AI applications, enabling coordinated video storage across local and cloud environments and multiple AI algorithms working across edge and remote nodes. This approach quickly unlocked digital transformation opportunities across thousands of stores, with a model that is replicable nationwide.
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Lightweight solutions: For retail, we have developed AI-powered footfall analysis, smart point-of-sale (POS) solutions, and precision marketing tools that enable data-driven, fine-grained operations for store owners. For small and medium manufacturers, we offer AI services spanning uniform compliance checks, smoking violation monitoring, and debris accumulation alerts. These services run on lightweight AI integrated into edge devices and support tools like OpenClaw, requiring no complex on-site deployment — truly out-of-the-box, rapid enablement. In education, we have introduced AI literacy courses, AI-enabled exam proctoring, and other smart education solutions that improve instructional quality and exam management fairness. In healthcare, the focus is on lightweight, standardized AI services: AI-guided triage, intelligent ultrasound-assisted detection, clinical decision support, and medical record quality control.
Standardized solutions make it easy for carrier account managers to sell AI — and to sell it well. Real-world examples bear this out: In Anhui, with Huawei's technical support, one carrier deployed an AI voice transcription service for 15 hospitals, helping doctors generate structured electronic medical records in under three minutes. In Guangdong, AI-based medical imaging increased lesion detection accuracy to 96%, while sub-second AI-assisted X-ray diagnosis reached 86% accuracy.
- One-stop services: Deploying AI is as much an operational challenge as a technical one. Drawing on carriers' nationwide presence — more than 30 provincial offices, over 300 municipal branches, and tens of thousands of physical service outlets — we provide end-to-end localized support spanning consulting, deployment, O&M, and training. This eliminates the AI adoption and mastery barriers that hold SMEs back.
To date, this model has served over ten thousand SMEs and delivered more than a thousand projects in education, healthcare, and other industries, a powerful validation of the inclusive AI model's viability and explosive growth potential in the SME market.
LE market: 5GtoB foundation + AI deep enablement create industry-wide competitive moats
Large enterprises, government agencies, and industry champions are the ballast of the digital economy. Their digital transformation requirements are full-stack, highly customized, and characterized by stringent security and reliability demands. The main objectives are straightforward: Use AI to cut costs and boost efficiency, raise quality and drive innovation, and keep everything secure and under control. The LE market is therefore not only the anchor of carriers' B2B revenue, but the main arena for demonstrating AItoB services at the highest level of value.
Huawei and carriers work in close alignment, using 5GtoB as the foundation and integrating AI, edge computing, big data, and cloud technologies to offer LE customers full-stack AI solutions. These solutions encompass customized networks, dedicated compute, joint model development, and jointly created applications. We are currently focused on five high-value verticals: manufacturing, energy, transportation, finance, and smart cities.
- 5G private networks + edge compute solidify the AI foundation: We customize dedicated 5G network slices, ultra-low-latency private networks, and edge computing nodes for LE customers. This configuration keeps data processing local and compute scheduling nearby, meeting the stringent real-time and security demands of use cases like precision industrial control, remote-assisted healthcare, and autonomous driving.
- Industry-specific large models + deep scenario integration empower production: Huawei works with industry leaders to jointly build vertical large models and embed them deeply into the operational chain spanning production, R&D, supply chain, sales, and service. In manufacturing, for example, we have developed AI-powered quality inspection, intelligent production scheduling, and predictive maintenance solutions that help factories move toward lights-out operations. In energy, we deliver AI-driven oil and gas exploration, intelligent grid dispatching, and production safety monitoring, significantly improving exploration accuracy and operational safety.
- Data security + sovereign control form the foundation of trust: Built on carriers' private data centers and rigorous data security and compliance systems, we provide LE customers with end-to-end security — from data storage and processing to data circulation — that meets data sovereignty and compliance requirements. On a deeper technical level, this directly addresses the reluctance of large enterprises to entrust their operations to AI, forming a trust moat for the AI era.
Today, Huawei and its carrier partners have established close collaboration with well over a thousand large enterprises and more than a hundred government agencies, delivering over a thousand "5G + AI" benchmark projects. The sustained growth of AI service revenue in the LE market is becoming the engine driving carriers' B2B growth.
Core strengths: Network + computing power as dual drivers for AItoB competitiveness
On the AItoB track, a market worth trillions of yuan, the field is crowded. There are Internet giants with algorithmic DNA, tech firms deeply embedded in vertical sectors, and traditional IT service providers. Amidst this fierce competition, what sets carriers apart and positions them as the partner of choice for enterprise digital transformation in the AI era is their hard-to-replicate, irreplaceable foundation of network and computing infrastructure. Layered on top of this are their nationwide three-tier sales networks, localized service capabilities, and data security and compliance advantages, which together form a unique and formidable competitive edge.
Network + Computing: A dual-engine foundation that anchors AI deployment
China's carriers operate the world's largest, widest-coverage, and highest-quality communications network — the very foundation on which all AI applications run. Today, more than three million 5G base stations cover over 95% of the population. Fiber broadband reaches every city and township, with over 100 million gigabit optical ports deployed. Backbone network bandwidth exceeds 100 Tbit/s, and end-to-end latency can be as low as milliseconds. This high-speed, stable, and low-latency network provides robust support for AI data transmission, remote interaction, and edge computing.
Innovation has always been in Huawei's DNA. In 2025, Huawei's R&D investment remained high, growing by more than 10% year-on-year. Over the past decade, Huawei has invested over CNY1.2 trillion (approximately US$170 billion) in R&D. To meet the demands of the AI era, Huawei has launched a new AI-Centric Network solution. By synergizing network, cloud, and AI capabilities, the solution provides powerful support for carriers and their customers for creating B2B growth together.
At the same time, Huawei is supporting carriers as they accelerate the deployment of intelligent computing infrastructure. More than 30 large-scale intelligent computing centers, over 200 regional computing nodes, and tens of thousands of edge computing sites have been built nationwide, with total computing capacity now exceeding 10 EFLOPS. Spanning training, inference, and edge computing, this capacity forms a complete cloud-edge-device, three-tier computing scheduling system. Whether an enterprise needs to train a large model in a central facility or run real-time inference at a factory edge, the system delivers sufficient, elastic, and cost-effective computing power to support them.
With the growing adoption of AI applications, Chinese carriers are beginning to embrace token-based business models. The convergence of computing and network foundations is the critical enabler of this transition. Through sustained innovation in areas like device-side connectivity, inference computing pooling, dedicated industry networks and lines, and AI-Centric Networks, Huawei is providing solid support for carriers as they shift from charging by bandwidth to charging by value — and by token.
Sales network + Ecosystem resources: Scale effects that lower customer acquisition and collaboration costs
Scale is the key to B2B success. With a base of over one billion individual subscribers and tens of millions of government and enterprise customers, carriers have touchpoints spanning every industry and every sector of the national economy, making them the most direct and efficient channel for reaching enterprise customers. At the same time, carriers have built an open, win-win AI industry ecosystem, partnering with more than 1,000 leading AI firms, technology companies, and industry partners. Through joint AI labs, joint innovation centers, and shared industry solution libraries, the ecosystem enables complementary capabilities, shared resources, and jointly created market opportunities. For enterprise customers, this ecosystem delivers one-stop, AI services that cover all categories and offer a plethora of choices. These services substantially reduce technology selection costs and partnership risk.
Localized services + Data security: The cornerstone of trust for addressing customer pain points
In the B2B domain, trust matters more than technology. Carriers operate a nationwide localized service network. With more than 300 prefecture-level branches and tens of thousands of service teams, they provide 24/7 localized consulting, deployment, O&M, and training services, responding rapidly to customer needs and definitively giving customers what they've always needed: help close at hand, right when it counts.
At the same time, as state-owned enterprises, carriers strictly comply with national data security laws and regulations. They possess a mature data security compliance system, an independently controllable technology architecture, and rigorous security management protocols. This ensures that enterprise data remains secure in storage, in processing, in transit, and under sovereign control, thoroughly eliminating concerns around data leakage, data misuse, and data sovereignty. This builds the strongest moat of trust in the AI era.
Driven by these strengths, we are witnessing the dawn of a new era — one defined not by connectivity alone, but by intelligence. This shift represents more than an upgrade to the business model of carriers; it is a liberation of productive forces across society.
Standing at this historic juncture, Huawei and carriers firmly believe that AItoB is not an optional question but a defining mandate for the next decade of development. It is not a short-term marketing trend, but a long-term strategic direction. It is not a single technology, but a fundamental reconfiguration of business.
As the national champions of the digital economy, carriers must actively embrace and lead this transformation — grounded in network and computing infrastructure, driven by SME scale expansion and LE deep enablement, supported by an open, win-win ecosystem, and committed to sustained cultivation of the AItoB market. We are confident that by empowering industries across the board in their digital and intelligent transformation, we will usher in a new golden era of B2B business with carriers.
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