We establish an explicit algebra isomorphism between the affine Yokonuma-Hecke algebra $widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q)$ and a direct sum of matrix algebras with coefficients in tensor products of affine Hecke algebras of type $A.$ As an application of this result, we show that $widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q)$ is affine cellular in the sense of Koenig and Xi, and further prove that it has finite global dimension when the parameter $q$ is not a root of the Poincare polynomial. As another application, we also recover the modular representation theory of $widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q)$ previously obtained in [CW].