The African Union (AU) headquarters is set within Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian Capital.
In 2006, Beijing pledged $200m to build the headquarters. Completed in 2012, everything was custom-built by the Chinese – including a state-of-the-art computer system. The building has since signified a tie between China and Africa.
In January 2018, it was reported that the AU’s computer system had been compromised by a French newspaper, Le Monde Afrique. It was found that, for five years, the AU had data transferred from their servers to servers in Shanghai. Data was leaked for five hours each day, allegedly for 1,825 days in a row. It was also reported that microphones and listening devices had been discovered in the walls and desks of the building, following a sweep for bugs.
Huawei are the main supplier of information and communication technology systems to the AU headquarters. In a review of the alleged incident, Danielle Cave of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said “It’s hard to see how – given Huawei’s role in providing equipment and key ICT services to the AU building and specifically to the AU’s data centre – the company could have remained completely unaware of the apparent theft of large amounts of data, every day, for five years.”
Huawei responded to this by stating “If there was a data leak from computers at the AU’s headquarters in Addis that went on for an extended period of time, these data leaks did not originate in technology supplied by Huawei to the AU. What Huawei supplied for the AU project included data centre facilities, but those facilities did not have any storage or data transfer functions.”
Despite Huawei being the main supplier to the AU headquarters, there is no conclusion and no evidence regarding the involvement of Huawei with the leak of data at AU.