Shanghai. It sounds strange that Chinese technology giant Huawei now has a mining team. The company said Tuesday it has begun introducing artificial intelligence in the mining industry in China that enables workers to operate remotely and safely without needing to go underground, as an example of the company’s global campaign to implement AI for better life conditions across sectors.

Intelligent mining allows miners to work safely above the ground in an air-conditioned room or the command center far away from the danger beneath the earth's surface.

In the northern province of Shaanxi, digging machines can be operated from the command center above the ground. 

Huawei said more than 5,000 5G stations were planted underground to support thousands of high-definition cameras in transmitting videos and pictures to the command center.

“This significantly improves production efficiency and safety of mining personnel,” Huawei’s Vice President for Public Affairs and Communication Department Edison Xie told international journalists in Shanghai on Tuesday evening.

Intelligent mining also uses autonomous driving trucks to transport mine products such as coal and metal ores to further improve efficiency and safety.

“In Europe, Huawei’s AI hardware and algorithms have shown great performance in protecting the region’s salmon, saving 90 percent of manpower in identifying individual salmon and achieving an 80 percent accuracy rate,” Edison said.

Huawei recently won an award at the World AI Cannes Festival for providing an AI-based solution to protect endangered wild Atlantic salmon in Norway. Huawei and a local partner designed a filtering system that prevents invasive species from spreading in Norwegian rivers.

“And in Mexico, Huawei’s cloud and AI technology are helping identify individual jaguars, an endangered species with only 4,000 remaining in the country,” Edison added.

Huawei also provided free cloud services that have benefited 60 million people in Panama by providing virtual education, especially for those living in remote areas, he claimed. 

In South Africa, Huawei connected more than 100 primary schools to the internet with 4G or 5G technology, benefiting more than 50,000 primary students in the country, Edison said.