At DTW Ignite 2025, TM Forum’s flagship event, the keynote stage made one thing clear: the era of internal AI is over. Telcos are building the infrastructure for everyone else’s.

In Copenhagen, telco leaders didn’t just talk about cost-saving automation. They talked about becoming platforms for AI—building real-world infrastructure for the next wave of enterprise intelligence.

From Globe Telecom’s “AI Kitchen” to China Mobile’s vast enterprise deployments, this year’s event marked a clear pivot. Telcos are no longer asking if they should be involved in AI. They’re asking how far they can go.

From Cost Center to Growth Engine

For years, telcos saw AI as a way to optimize networks and reduce OPEX. This year, DTW flipped the script.

AI isn’t just something telcos use—it’s something they can sell.

  • Globe Telecom launched its “AI Kitchen” to co-develop solutions with partners using telco data and capabilities.
  • China Mobile shared its rollout of AI services across 1.2 million enterprise endpoints—factories, cities, logistics, and more.
  • BT, in backstage conversations, described its global infrastructure as “AI-ready,” with sovereign edge layers optimized for privacy and real-time response.
  • Vodafone explored the potential of its infrastructure to support new agent-based and AI-native workloads.

These stories weren’t about pilots. They were about market entry.

$250B Opportunity: The Rise of Responsible AI in Telecom

McKinsey recently projected that Responsible AI (RAI) in telecom could generate $250 billion by 2040, with the majority of this value flowing through telco infrastructure—not internal operations.

This is about enabling regulated industries—finance, healthcare, energy, and government—to adopt AI at scale and with trust. Telcos have the tools: privacy, data sovereignty, global reach, and compliance expertise.

But unlocking that opportunity will require massive ecosystem coordination.

Partnerships Will Decide the Winners

The keynote stage made one thing clear: no telco can do this alone.

  • BT + Google: Partnering on an AI fabric for enterprise-grade applications, combining secure networking with AI orchestration.
  • Telefonica + Microsoft: Launching sovereign AI labs to train models under EU-compliant conditions.
  • T-Mobile + NVIDIA: Building edge-AI applications across verticals like automotive, retail, and logistics.
  • SKT + Anthropic: Joint work on Claude agents tailored for telecom customer care and enterprise use cases.
  • Etisalat + Core42: Creating full-stack AI-native services for the MENA region.
  • KPN + Microsoft: Partnering on Sovereign AI Cloud.

These partnerships are the new telco stack—hybrids of compute, connectivity, and intelligence.

Datacenters, Edge, and the Infrastructure Race

AI doesn’t live in the cloud alone. It needs:

Latency-aware interconnects Sovereign data zones Distributed compute at the edge End-to-end observability and orchestration

Telcos are uniquely positioned to offer all of these—if they act now.

This is where players like Intel and NVIDIA come in:

Intel is enabling telcos to build sovereign, private AI clouds—closer to the edge, optimized for trust and vertical workloads. NVIDIA is powering agentic AI with accelerated compute and already partnering with operators to deploy GPU-powered services at telco PoPs.

If telcos move fast, they can own a new layer: AI delivery infrastructure for the enterprise world.

The Real Story at DTW: A New Identity for Telcos

DTW Ignite 2025 wasn’t just about product launches. It was a turning point in storytelling.

“We are no longer just the pipes. We are the platform on which regulated industries can run trusted AI.” — Executive, DTW keynote stage

This mindset shift—from infrastructure providers to AI enablers—is the most important development in years.

But it won’t happen automatically.

What Needs to Happen Next

To capture this moment, telcos must:

✅ Build ecosystems, not just platforms

✅ Partner deeply with AI leaders and hardware giants

✅ Prioritize developer and enterprise engagement

✅ Make AI a growth strategy, not a side experiment

✅ Invest in sovereign infrastructure and edge compute

2025 is the year telcos joined the AI conversation as equal players. The ones who scale now—across data centers, partners, and developer ecosystems—will shape the next decade.

The age of AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And telcos might just power it.