Huawei and Cooperative Bank boost digital finance in Ethiopia with green data centers
October 2nd 2025
Huawei Digital Power and Cooperative Bank of Oromia (COOP), ranked among Ethiopia’s top five private banks, have deployed next-generation data center solutions, incorporating artificial intelligence, to enhance the reliability, security, and sustainability of the country’s rapidly expanding digital financial services.
Africa is accelerating its digital transformation to create jobs for its growing youth population and overcome bottlenecks in agriculture and infrastructure. Anchored in the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy (2020–2030), the continent aims to make the digital economy a key driver of its GDP by 2030, fostering deeper integration and inclusive growth. Ethiopia is aligning with this vision by developing digital finance and mobile payments. COOP’s “digital-first” strategy is central to this progress: approximately 80% of its transactions are now conducted digitally, more than 3.6 trillion Ethiopian birr (USD 24.7 billion) have been processed through its mobile banking platform, and the bank serves more than 15 million customers.
With surging digital demand, COOP’s existing infrastructure had reached its design limits, necessitating a transition to a high-density, energy-efficient, and easily scalable architecture. Limited rack capacity required denser solutions without costly physical expansion. Gaps in automation, disaster recovery, and cross-data center resiliency increased operational risks—in a context where infrastructure fragility can lengthen recovery times and affect service continuity.
To address these challenges, Huawei Digital Power has deployed AI-based smart power and smart modular data center solutions. By combining AI-driven power management and simplified modular architecture, these solutions reduce energy consumption and operating costs while enhancing security and availability for millions of customers:
Solutions deployed
- FusionModule2000 — An integrated modular unit combining power, cooling, racks, cabling, and sensing in a compact form factor. It allows for gradual expansion as needed to support higher densities without oversizing and with better CAPEX optimization; ensures continuous cooling even during power outages with intelligent temperature alerts; and offers power chain visualization for accurate fault detection. Massive data collection coupled with AI analytics enables on-demand cooling that reduces energy consumption by 8-15% for thermal control, while intelligent management provides real-time monitoring and proactive maintenance to reduce OPEX.
- UPS5000-E — A high-efficiency modular UPS providing uninterrupted power protection. Its hot-swappable modules allow individual loads to be added or isolated during operation, simplifying maintenance, improving availability, and reducing both engineering and O&M costs.
COOP emphasized that with the rapid expansion of its customer base and digital transactions, having a secure, always-on, and efficient infrastructure has become vital. With the deployment of Huawei Digital Power’s modular and intelligent solutions, the bank now has a more secure and reliable foundation , driven by technological innovation—reducing strategic risks related to its reliance on digital channels, while optimizing total cost of ownership through improved energy efficiency, smart operations, and modular maintenance. This architecture also provides scalable capacity to support growth in customers, transactions, and services without costly physical expansion , while promoting more sustainable operations , in line with Ethiopia’s and Africa’s sustainability and digital economy development goals. It thus strengthens customer confidence and supports inclusive growth across the country.
This deployment provides COOP with a resilient, efficient, and scalable data center foundation for inclusive digital finance. Going forward, Huawei Digital Power will deepen its collaboration across priority sectors—finance, government, education, healthcare, and enterprise—to co-innovate and deliver secure, energy-efficient, and intelligent infrastructure, creating tangible value for citizens, institutions, and businesses in Africa.
Back