Belo Horizonte, BrazilMay 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Huawei and CEMIG are working closely together to build intelligent infrastructure.
Every day, millions of Brazilians press a button: they start their computers, turn on production equipment. Electricity arrives silently. Yet, behind the press of a button lies far more complexity than imagined; demand has changed: new technologies, new consumption patterns, new quality standards. In this new landscape, any economic ambition hinges on an absolute prerequisite: stable, continuous, and efficient energy.
Brazil’s power industry is one of the largest and most complex in the world: approximately 90 million electricity consumption units and over 700,000 kilometers of distribution network. This is infrastructure that can never stop. It is against this backdrop that the energy company of Minas Gerais state (CEMIG) decided to accelerate its digital transformation.
Sandro Bernardes, CEMIG’s Power Communications Manager, said: CEMIG is considered Brazil’s largest integrated electric power company, covering generation, transmission, distribution, and electricity trading. The company serves 774 municipalities in Minas Gerais state, providing electricity to over 9 million customers across its entire concession area. CEMIG operates one of Brazil’s largest power grids, with a mission to deliver high-quality electricity to the people of Minas Gerais, from large cities to rural areas, from industry to agriculture, ensuring safe power. To fulfill this mission, CEMIG is executing the largest investment plan in its history: doubling the number of substations, expanding capacity, and modernizing operations. However, in supporting this expansion, we identified a bottleneck: insufficient coverage of communication solutions. For CEMIG’s power system to sustain growth and serve the people of Minas Gerais, it must continuously improve safety levels, power quality, and resilience. Our communication infrastructure must keep pace with this development, covering every station. In this context, CEMIG began searching for strategic partners. Huawei stood out in our public tender; their proposal fully met all specified technical requirements.
With Huawei’s power solutions, CEMIG will have a high-capacity communication network covering the entire state, centrally managed by a control center. For CEMIG, this partnership goes far beyond technology; it represents efficient capital allocation with optimal cost-effectiveness. It also drives asset modernization. Additionally, a robust communication system is crucial for safe operation and automation. Looking ahead, the direction of the power industry is toward dedicated networks like LTE. After internal and external studies, CEMIG chose the 450MHz frequency band. This band follows 3GPP standards, has a mature end-to-end ecosystem, enables wide coverage, supports massive connections, offers high reliability, and provides outstanding cost-effectiveness, widely adopted by the global energy industry. Huawei is one of the leaders in power solutions.
Mitsuo Nonaka, Senior Account Manager at Huawei, stated: Huawei has extensive experience in the power sector, having deployed over a thousand dedicated networks across multiple industries in more than 60 countries worldwide. Now, Huawei is bringing safe, innovative, and highly reliable connectivity solutions to CEMIG. The LTE 450MHz dedicated network project built by CEMIG perfectly aligns with the market needs of the power industry. Huawei works closely with CEMIG in a consultative and collaborative manner to address connectivity challenges in automation and communication for auto-reclosers, smart meters, substation sensing systems, and other critical operations.
Chen Long, Director of Huawei Enterprise Wireless Marketing and Solutions Sales, said: The 450MHz frequency band is not only a 3GPP-recognized spectrum but is also hailed as the best band for wide-area massive connections. Thanks to its excellent wide coverage capabilities, this solution performs exceptionally well both in commercial networks and field tests: power consumption reduced by 20%, performance improved by 30%. The collaboration between CEMIG and Huawei will build an always-on communication foundation, ensuring reliable power supply for millions of Brazilian households.
Today’s CEMIG is vastly different from just a few years ago. It is a company with operations across the entire state, one that expands its network without compromising quality, one that delivers reliable electricity to places that previously had no power, and one that continues to grow driven by intelligence, safety, and mission. In this transformation, Huawei is not just a technology supplier; it is a partner that understands the scale of this challenge, a power partner bringing globally proven solutions, and a partner helping CEMIG build the communication infrastructure to support its largest expansion plan in history.
CEMIG and Huawei are jointly building intelligent infrastructure.