What’s up with… Proximus, e&, Tata & Nvidia

• Proximus sells datacentres, ups guidance
• e& adds Euro muscle with PPF acquisition
• Tata taps Nvidia’s GPUs as India’s AI race heats up

In today’s industry news roundup: Proximus sells its datacentre business as it raises its full year guidance; e& completes its acquisition of telecom assets in eastern Europe; Tata Communications and Reliance are the latest Indian firms to strike deals with Nvidia; and much more!

Belgian telco Proximus is offloading its datacentre business to Antwerp-based Datacenter United for €128m as part of its plan to raise €500m from asset sales by 2027. “While customers will continue to benefit from state-of-the-art infrastructure, with data stored in Belgium and managed by an expert partner, Proximus will continue to pursue its hybrid cloud strategy and further sharpen its focus on delivering value added services to customers as an IT integrator,” noted the telco in this announcement. As that statement suggests, Proximus sees its future as a provider of communications, IT and digital services – internationally as well as in its domestic market – that focuses its asset ownership on core infrastructure, such as its mobile and fibre access networks. News of the datacentre business sale agreement came as Proximus reported its third-quarter financial results: It increased group revenues by 0.2% on a like-for-like basis to €1.64bn and increased its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) by 1.6% to €480m. The operator has raised our growth expectations for the full year, with domestic revenue expected to grow up to 3%, domestic EBITDA to grow up to 3%, and group EBITDA to grow by up to 3% too. In his comments, group CEO Guillaume Boutin focused on the telco’s international digital services growth potential. “The past few months have been focused on further optimising the collaboration of our international brands [BICS, Route Mobile and Telesign]. The signing of some major strategic customer agreements underlines our increasing relevance in these global digital communication markets. In September, we reinforced our strategic collaboration with Infosys, leveraging the strengths of Route Mobile and Telesign’s CPaaS [communications platform-as-a-service] and Digital Identity solutions. This partnership will unlock new business opportunities and enhance customer experience by driving innovation in omnichannel customer engagement and AI-driven digital assistants. This, along with the agreement signed with Microsoft [at the end of June] will be supporting our international financial ambitions. In the third quarter 2024, the international segment direct margin was up by 2.3% and posted a 4.2% increase in EBITDA on a pro forma basis,” noted the CEO.

Middle eastern giant e& has completed the acquisition of a controlling stake (50% plus one economic share) in PPF Telecom Group’s operations in Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia. The €2.2bn deal was first announced in August 2023. “This acquisition marks a significant step in e&’s ongoing global expansion ambitions, diversifying and growing its geographical presence to 38 countries,” noted e& in this statement. “This milestone is poised to transform the telecom landscape in the central and eastern Europe (CEE) region and deliver enhanced value to over 10 million customers across the four markets. The partnership will provide them access to cutting-edge technologies, expanded product offerings, and innovative digital services to accelerate digital growth and empower businesses and communities alike.” According to e&, the deal will “leverage synergies in network operations, procurement and customer service, driving increased operational efficiency and unlocking new opportunities for growth, innovation and enhanced customer experiences across the region. e&’s expertise in digital services, AI and IoT will further enhance PPF Telecom’s offerings, ensuring a seamless transition and continued access to best-in-class services. Customers will benefit from an expanded portfolio of world-class products and services, including advanced B2B and IoT solutions.”

The race is on to be the AI services leader in India. Tata Communications has announced a “transformative upgrade to its AI cloud infrastructure in India, powered by Nvidia Hopper GPUs. The strategic collaboration marks a significant milestone in the country’s AI journey, positioning Tata Communications as a key player in enabling AI applications across a wide spectrum of industries – including manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and banking and financial services – and equipping them with the computing power needed to handle complex AI workloads.” According to Tata Comms, it will “integrate cutting-edge Nvidia software solutions, such as Nvidia NIM microservices, and the Nvidia Omniverse and Nvidia Isaac platforms, into its AI cloud offerings. These technologies will provide businesses with an extensive suite of tools and services designed for AI-driven simulation, automation and more. At the end of this year, Tata Communications will begin the first phase of its large-scale deployment of Hopper GPUs, establishing itself as one of the largest Nvidia Hopper GPU cloud-based supercomputers in India. The second phase, planned for 2025, will further expand the infrastructure with Blackwell GPUs. Tata Communications is poised to disrupt the AI landscape with an AI studio, a groundbreaking, all-in-one platform designed to transform how businesses use AI, by offering tools like AI Workbench, Model Garden, Responsible AI and serverless functions,” it added in this announcement, which followed in the wake of Tech Mahindra’s news that it is developing a Hindi large language model (LLM) for the Indian market using Nvidia technology. And Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), parent company of India’s largest telco Reliance Jio, is also teaming up with Nvidia to roll out large-scale AI infrastructure in India: The AI chip giant will supply its Blackwell AI processors for a one-gigawatt datacentre that Reliance is building in the western state of Gujarat. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discussed the deal with RIL chief Mukesh Ambani at Nvidia’s AI Summit in Mumbai.

The Portuguese Competition Authority has given Digi Communications clearance for its €150m acquisition of Cabonitel, the parent company of Nowo Communications, the country’s fourth-largest network operator, which Vodafone tried to acquire before being thwarted earlier this year by Portugal’s competition watchdog, the Autoridade da Concorrência (AdC). Digi, which has already been investing in its own fibre access network infrastructure in Portugal, announced at the beginning of August that it has agreed to acquire Cabonitel, the parent company of Nowo, which has 270,000 mobile customers and 130,000 customers for its pay-TV and broadband services. Portugal’s telecom regulator Anacom previously approved the deal. 

Research house Gartner expects worldwide IT spending to rise by 9.3% year on year to $5.74tn in 2025. Gartner says the rise will be fuelled by the sale of servers for datacentres and further investment in generative AI (GenAI). John-David Lovelock, VP analyst at Gartner, explained, “Current spending on GenAI has been predominantly from technology companies building the supply-side infrastructure for GenAI.” However, he added a timely caveat: “CIOs will begin to spend on GenAI, beyond proof-of-concept work, starting in 2025. More money will be spent, but the expectations that CIOs have for the capabilities of GenAI will drop. The reality of what can be accomplished with current GenAI models, and the state of CIOs’ data, will not meet today’s lofty expectations.” Fssst! It’s the sound of reality biting and causing the AI hype bubble to spring a slow puncture. Nonetheless, Lovelock does accept that “GenAI will easily eclipse the effects that cloud and outsourcing vendors had on previous years regarding datacentre systems. It took 20 years for the cloud and outsourcing vendors to build up spending to $67bn a year on servers. The demand of GenAI will help nearly triple server sales from 2023 to 2028.”

Plano, Texas-based network equipment vendor Ribbon Communications might not be a name readily associated with major telecom projects in India but its background has positioned it well for such success. The company was formed in 2017 following the merger of Genband and Sonus Networks and, in 2019, it acquired Israel-based ECI Telecom in a $486m deal. It was an astute move: ECI had carved out a decent market share of the Indian optical equipment sector and was well-regarded by its many clients. Ribbon has since maintained and nurtured those good customer relations whilst continuing to make innovative additions to its optical packet transport portfolio. That strategy has helped it to compete with the likes of Ciena and Nokia. Ribbon’s reputation will be further enhanced with news that it has completed a large-scale DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) deployment for Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telco after Reliance Jio. The new implementation spans 30,000km and will use Ribbon’s Apollo 9600 suite of programmable and open optical transport platforms, which support the C+L bands, across Bharti’s network. The deployment will provide Airtel with 51.2 Tbit/s of long-haul network capacity to enable the service provider to manage the growing volumes of data traffic being generated by 5G backhaul and the emerging cloud and datacentre-to-datacentre services sectors in India. The Ribbon Muse platform also enables operator-defined workflow automation and enhances operational efficiency via real-time network monitoring and management. Commenting on the deployment, Randeep Sekhon, Airtel’s CTO, stated: “Ribbon’s proven expertise and cutting-edge solutions were instrumental in our decision to partner with them on this extensive modernisation project. By integrating Ribbon’s state-of-the-art optical transport technologies, we can now meet our customers’ growing demand for 5G and high speed connectivity, positioning us to successfully execute our long-term business strategy.” Ribbon’s CEO, Bruce McClelland, added: “Airtel is one of the world’s leading providers and we’re proud to have partnered on this significant deployment. Our highly modular, powerful, versatile and secure solutions will enable them to precisely meet their service needs, easily accommodate traffic growth and adopt new technologies while delivering high quality connectivity to their massive customer base.”

– The staff, TelecomTV