Huawei’s Li Peng: Unleashing New Growth in 5G and New 5.5G Commercialization
The digital opportunity for Iraq to accelerate its economic rebirth
By: William Yang, Huawei Iraq CEO
The Iraq vision for Sustainable Development 2030 envisions, among other objectives, increasing the efficiency of the critical oil sector and creating decent job opportunities for all unemployed people.
As a global actor within this ecosystem, Huawei believes four key pillars will help the country achieve these objectives – advanced technologies, cybersecurity, digital talent, and green ICT.
To power the gains envisioned in the country’s growth agenda starts with adopting the latest and most advanced technologies. Therefore, telecom service providers need to remain competitive and consider undertaking investments to accommodate much higher bandwidth demand for consumers and SMEs while catering to enterprises’ needs for multi-cloud environments. The fact that Iraq lacks legacy infrastructure places the country at an advantage since there are opportunities to adopt “leapfrogging” technologies such as AI to power a digital future. Iraq can also leverage its location at the crossroads of the highest-growth regions of global data connectivity—the Europe-Asia Internet traffic route—to develop an advanced regional data hub.
AI, for example, brings significant efficiencies to the country’s oil and gas sector across the entire value chain. Automation helps oil and gas companies assess the value of reservoirs, customize drilling and completion plans based on specific geology, and assess the risks of each well. This is done using algorithms without the expensive exploratory drilling that characterized traditional oil and gas upstream operations. In addition, downstream processes can be optimized to minimize costs and maximize spreads.
Huawei is doing its part to transform the energy sector using data and intelligence technologies. In 2021, we announced a new solution – Intelligent Oil & Gas Fields – designed to help oil and gas enterprises to go digital. The solution covers several aspects of digitalization, including campus security, production inspection and predictive maintenance.
Another major priority for accelerating Iraq’s digital economy is scaling its talent pool. Digital skills are increasingly crucial for promoting digital employment opportunities for young Iraqis. Therefore, we must continue investing in talent development to ensure that organizations have access to the qualified personnel they need to pursue their transformation goals. At Huawei, for example, we have longstanding programs such as the Huawei Middle East ICT Competition, Seeds for the Future, and ICT Academy to support Iraq in building a sustainable knowledge-based economy.
And there’s enough talent in Iraq to drive its digital agenda. An Iraqi team was among ten finalists in Huawei’s inaugural Tech4Good Global competition 2022. Tech4Good is a crucial part of Huawei’s flagship CSR program, Seeds for the Future, an initiative that aims to help cultivate young talent, equipping them with the skills and mindsets needed to be competitive in the workplaces of the future. The Iraqi team demonstrated an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based air pollution monitoring and tracking system that can replace costly and inadequate fixed stations monitoring stations.
As Iraq rebuilds its ICT infrastructure, it should prioritize green ICT to ensure sustainable development as envisioned in Vision 2030 and achieve savings in the long run. The ICT industry is a considerable consumer of energy. For instance, in the domain of data center facilities, Data Economic forecasts the world’s data centers could consume one-fifth of earth’s power by 2025. We can now use AI technologies to save energy and decrease the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of local data centers. In parallel, today’s digital technologies also play a critical role in reducing the carbon footprint of other industries. According to the World Economic Forum, ICT will help reduce industrial emissions by 12.1 billion tons globally by 2030. This is ten times greater than the emissions by the ICT industry itself. Applications of AI and cloud substantially impact reducing emissions across all sectors in Iraq.
Evidence suggests that for every job created in broadband infrastructure deployment, between 1.83 and 3.42 additional jobs are indirectly added or induced in the economy—higher than most other infrastructure investments. Based on the above priorities, Iraq can achieve its socioeconomic goals by investing in AI-enabled ICT development, digital talent, and green ICT to accelerate its progress as a significant player in the region’s digital economy.