Artificial intelligence (AI) factories are producing intelligence at unprecedented scale, showing massive potential to fuel economic growth and innovation.
To accelerate taking advantage of AI opportunities in their sector, operators Orange, Fastweb, Swisscom, Telefónica and Telenor have announced a collaboration with Nvidia to develop and expand sovereign AI factories and edge infrastructure across Europe.
The telcos believe that they are uniquely positioned to deliver AI services due to their extensive infrastructure and geographic reach. The ultimate aim of the partnership is to equip European enterprises across industries with secure, accelerated computing infrastructure to train and deploy customised AI models and agentic AI services working in a sovereign AI infrastructure.
The collaboration will see Nvidia’s full-stack technologies implemented to allow telcos to go beyond traditional connectivity services to AI as a service, driving generative and agentic AI adoption. This is also seen as empowering nations to build localised models with secure sovereign AI infrastructure.
Looking at individual companies’ deployments, the enterprise division of the Orange Group, Orange Business, has joined the Nvidia Cloud Partner programme to accelerate the development of enterprise-grade agentic AI, including its Live Intelligence platform, which is designed to enable companies to securely deploy generative AI at scale. Those AI solutions use the Orange Business Cloud Avenue platform, built on Nvidia infrastructure.
This is seen as allowing enterprises across Europe to access AI infrastructure, train custom AI models and deploy secure generative AI applications through the Orange Business’ Live Intelligence platform – as well as offer the possibility of transforming employee, customer and operational experiences.
Orange has also applied AI to its own operations, with 73,000 employees now regularly using the system to streamline tasks, develop software, automate support procedures and enhance decision-making processes. Orange’s sovereign AI infrastructure supports employees in France, as well as across Europe and Africa, and handling more than 30,000 requests daily.
Building on its creation of its host country’s first sovereign AI infrastructure, Norway’s Telenor is to expand capacity to meet rising demand from both internal teams and external customers. With plans to add an AI datacentre that will run entirely on renewable energy and contribute surplus energy back to the grid, the company believes it is helping Norway to advance its mission of secure, sovereign and sustainable AI development.
Telenor believes that since launch, its AI infrastructure has helped drive AI adoption across Norway by powering digital services for the public sector, industrial automation and local language models.
This includes hosting BabelSpeak, an AI-driven translation tool developed by Capgemini that offers near-real-time, voice-to-voice multilingual translation capabilities in nearly 100 languages and is now being piloted by Norwegian Red Cross.
Capgemini has been a key partner for Telenor to build Norway’s first sovereign and secure AI cloud service in collaboration with Nvidia.
In addition, Telenor is integrating Nvidia AI Enterprise software to accelerate enterprise adoption and deployment of generative and agentic AI applications, as well as its own internal innovation efforts, such as in network automation.
Swisscom has launched the AI Work Hub and Model catalogue, enabling enterprises across Switzerland to build complex AI projects, customise models and deploy agentic AI at scale and speed.
The operator recently announced GenAI Studio – a new service built on its Swiss AI Platform that allows enterprises to develop and run AI agents. The enterprise AI services are hosted on Swisscom’s sovereign AI factory, built on Nvidia DGX SuperPOD. This allows for scaling of capacity to serve Switzerland’s rapidly growing demand for AI services and inference, expanding the company’s revenue opportunities.
