Huawei to build data centers in South Africa

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - China's Huawei will build two data centers in South Africa from March, it said, as part of plans to expand cloud services across Africa.

"The company is working with South African partners for the construction of the data centers in Johannesburg initially and later Cape Town," Huawei said in a statement.

Its cloud service will be available to organizations in South Africa as well as neighboring countries, it said.

The Chinese firm, at the center of global security concerns, will challenge Amazon.com Inc, which is also expanding its presence in the emerging tech hub of Cape Town in a challenge against cloud computing rival Microsoft Corp.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the global leader in cloud computing.

In the last quarter of 2018 AWS's revenue grew 46 percent to $7 billion while Microsoft's grew 76 percent to $4 billion to remain in second place, data from research firm Canalys showed.

(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; editing by Jason Neely)