How Huawei is Reshaping Healthcare & Education with AI

AI is reshaping everything – from industries and economies to team structures and workloads.

Huawei is using AI in education and healthcare to reshape how students learn and how patients are diagnosed and treated, as showcased at the Public Sector CEO Media Roundtable during MWC Barcelona 2026.

A new chapter for intelligent public services

At the Barcelona roundtable, Huawei’s Global Public Sector Business Unit brought together media and sector leaders to explore how AI and cloud infrastructure are being applied in higher education, K‑12 schools and healthcare systems worldwide. 

Framed under the theme Advancing Intelligence in Education and Healthcare to Create New Value, the discussion highlighted concrete deployments that move beyond pilots to at‑scale platforms serving tens of thousands of learners and patients.

Speaker Du Min, Vice President of Huawei’s Global Public Sector BU and President of the Higher Education BU, described how AI is shifting education from one-way knowledge delivery to practice-centric learning. Meanwhile, William Zhang, President of Huawei’s Healthcare BU, highlighted the transformation of healthcare from manual, time-intensive workflows to data-driven, AI-assisted diagnosis and care.

Education and AI: from theory to real‑world practice

Du Min argued that AI is forcing a fundamental rethink of traditional education models, where 80-90% of learning has historically been lecture‑based and only a small fraction devoted to hands-on practice. Huawei’s response is to “bring the real industry into education,” using AI platforms to connect theory with industrial scenarios in both universities and K‑12.

Huawei’s AI Education Center (AIEC) exemplifies this shift. Built on four layers – computing power, service, platform and curriculum – AIEC turns complex AI infrastructure into ready‑to‑use courses and experiments for schools. 

In Wenzhou, China, a city‑wide AI General Education Platform now provides systematic AI curriculum resources to more than 500 primary and secondary schools, addressing disparities in access to digital content across districts. According to Du, more than 10,000 students and 1,000 teachers are already actively using the platform, with usage rising rapidly since its launch.

For higher education, Huawei’s AI Practice Lab is designed to tackle familiar bottlenecks: fragmented experimental environments, insufficient computing power and a disconnect between academic content and industry needs. 

At Beijing Institute of Technology, Huawei and the university have established AI‑powered interdisciplinary labs, co‑developed more than 20 specialised courses and created pathways that blend AI with disciplines such as law, chemical engineering and economics, training more than 1,000 practice‑ready AI professionals each year.

Underpinning these initiatives is large‑scale infrastructure. At Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Huawei helped build Zhiyuan‑1, which the company describes as China’s largest computing platform for universities, with 633 PFLOPS of peak performance and 13 PB of storage. 

Eight major large models, including DeepSeek, run on the platform, which now serves over 38,000 users and supports research ranging from deep‑sea biology to early cancer screening. For Du, this marks a turning point: computing power has become general‑purpose research infrastructure, not just an IT asset.

Guardrails: equity, inclusion and AI literacy

The roundtable also surfaced concerns about over‑reliance on AI among younger learners. 

Asked how Huawei avoids students simply outsourcing thinking to AI, Du emphasised that the role of schools is expanding from knowledge transmission to shaping values and digital literacy. 

In practice, this means teaching students how AI systems work, their limitations and appropriate use, so that they can “choose the right way to use AI” rather than passively consuming automated outputs.

Equity remains a central theme. 

Huawei says it has already served more than 7,800 educational and research institutions globally and is working with local authorities in China to roll out AI platforms at municipal level so that no student is left behind in the transition to digital and intelligent education.

From data silos to clinical impact

On the healthcare side, William Zhang described the sector as “the crown jewel for the AI world,” where the bar for clinical safety, accuracy and integration into workflows is high. 

Huawei claims to support digital and intelligent transformation for more than 6,200 medical institutions in more than 110 countries and regions, focusing on three pillars: AI infrastructure, algorithms and medical data.

In China, Huawei’s AI + Healthcare initiative is enabling hospitals to build large models tailored to clinical scenarios. 

Working with a leading Shanghai hospital, Huawei developed a pathology model that achieves about 94% average accuracy across 19 common cancer types, covering roughly 90% of cancer cases in China, and is already being used in real clinical workflows under the RuiPath brand. The company has also deployed AI to automatically generate electronic medical records, cutting documentation time from 10-15 minutes per case to around a minute, freeing clinicians to focus on patient care.

To tackle persistent challenges around data storage, sharing and remote pathology consultation, Huawei’s Digital Pathology Solution uses lossless compression, multi‑protocol interoperability and all‑in‑one systems to support full‑lifecycle management of digital slides. 

The solution enables second‑level access to more than 1,000 pathological sections, reduces storage requirements by 45% and supports multidisciplinary team consultations and pathology education.

Telemedicine as a foundation for global collaboration

The convergence of 5G, AI and cloud is also opening up new models of telemedicine and cross‑border collaboration. Huawei highlighted the National Telemedicine Center at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, established in 2018, which now connects more than 1,000 institutions in China’s Henan Province, more than 100 additional hospitals across China and partners in countries such as Zambia. 

Each year, the centre delivers more than 30,000 remote consultations, 400,000 tele‑diagnoses in pathology, ECG and imaging and continuing education for more than 500,000 healthcare professionals.

For Zhang, these examples underscore how AI and connectivity can help address chronic workforce and infrastructure gaps, including in under‑resourced regions such as rural China and parts of Africa. 

By combining unified AI data platforms, model management “flywheels” that continuously retrain on real clinical data, and agent‑based “digital twins” of doctors, Huawei aims to reduce costs, improve accuracy and speed up skills transfer to the next generation of clinicians.

Towards an intelligent, inclusive future

Across both education and healthcare, Huawei’s message in Barcelona was that AI must be embedded in real‑world systems – classrooms, clinics, research labs and telemedicine hubs – to create lasting value. 

That requires not only powerful infrastructure and models, but also ecosystem partnerships, policy support and a sustained focus on inclusion, from city‑wide school platforms in Wenzhou to national telemedicine networks in Henan.

As governments and providers consider their next moves, the roundtable made one point clear: in the era of intelligent public services, the real differentiator will be how effectively AI connects people, data and practice to expand access, improve outcomes and ensure that no learner or patient is left behind.