What’s up with… SoftBank, STC, SFR

• SoftBank snaps up AI chip developer Graphcore
• STC’s Iberian M&A focus may now switch to Vodafone Portugal
• SFR taps Google for GenAI capabilities

In today’s industry news roundup: Japan’s SoftBank is adding to its AI arsenal with the acquisition of UK chip developer Graphcore; with talks to acquire Altice Portugal now over, STC might switch its M&A focus to Vodafone Portugal; French operator SFR is to use Google technology to add generative AI smarts to its customer care operations; and much more!

Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group, the owner of telco SoftBank Corp., has acquired UK-based chipmaker Graphcore in a bid to further fuel its AI ambitions. In an announcement made by Graphcore, the company stated it will continue to operate under its name, but it has become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank, something that the chipmaker’s co-founder and CEO, Nigel Toon, described as “a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale”. He added that there is still “much to do to improve efficiency, resilience, and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI”, and SoftBank is seen as a partner to enable its team to “redefine the landscape for AI technology.” According to Vikas J. Parekh, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, next-generation semiconductors and compute systems are “essential” in the artificial general intelligence (AGI) journey, which makes Graphcore a suitable addition to the SoftBank empire. Financial terms of the Graphcore acquisition were not disclosed, but the Financial Times cited sources claiming the deal was valued at just above US$600m, which is below the nearly $700m that the company has reportedly attracted through a series of funding rounds. It also represents a significant dip in the valuation of Graphcore, which was valued at almost $2.8bn following an investment round in 2020. Founded in 2016, the company was regarded only a few years ago as a potential rival to AI chip giant Nvidia, although unlike the latter’s focus on graphics processing units (GPUs), Graphcore develops the so-called “intelligence processing units” which it describes as highly parallel processors, designed for AI and machine learning (ML) applications.

STC has been advised to turn its M&A attentions elsewhere in Portugal following the breakdown in talks between the Saudi telco giant and Altice Portugal, for which it had been the preferred bidder: The two parties were unable to agree on final terms for an €8bn-plus deal, as reported earlier this month. That the talks with Altice came to nothing would have been a blow to STC, which is aiming to develop itself a role in the Iberian telecom sector following its investment in Spain’s national telco Telefónica. So now, according to Portugal’s Economia Online, STC has been advised to explore a potential takeover bid for Vodafone Portugal, which has just been thwarted by the country’s competition watchdog in its efforts to bulk up by acquiring Nowo Communications. The news outlet also reported that with STC no longer in discussions to acquire Altice Portugal, a consortium led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus, which had dropped out of the bidding for the Portuguese operator earlier in the year, has restarted M&A talks with Patrick Drahi’s Altice Group.

French operator SFR (also known as Altice France) has partnered with Google to introduce generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to its customer service teams. In a translated statement, the telco explained that it has designed and deployed a solution based on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, a unified AI development platform that provides access to Gemini, the tech giant’s suite of multimodal large language models (LLMs). The solution, as SFR puts it, analyses the interactions between customer care advisors and clients, and helps its teams to provide relevant support and respond to requests in a “considerably reduced time”. According to the French telco, in addition to bringing operational efficiency, the solution will increase customer satisfaction while its customer service staff can focus on more demanding tasks. It also expects that the solution will allow the telco to process more than 2 million customer cases per year.

The data of “nearly all” AT&T wireless subscribers during a six-month period in 2022 was affected by a major hacking attack that occurred earlier this year, in what is the second significant security breach disclosed by the company in 2024. The US operator acknowledged in a statement that it has found that customer data, including phone call and text message records, was “illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform”. This meant that this data allowed for hackers to see the phone numbers with which an AT&T number had interacted from 1 May 2022 to 31 October 2022, as well as on 2 January 2023. The company stressed that the downloaded data doesn’t include the content of any calls or messages exchanged between an AT&T subscriber and other numbers. “At this time, we do not believe the data is publicly available”, it stated, adding that it is working with law enforcement agencies to apprehend the hackers. AT&T further stated that it has confirmed that the affected access point has been secured following its investigation of the incident. At the end of March, the US operator disclosed that in another security breach, the personal data of nearly 73 million current and former customers has been leaked on the dark web.

G.Network, a London-based fibre broadband provider, is reportedly exploring a sale after receiving interest from other broadband companies including CityFibre and Community Fibre. Sky News reported that G.Network has engaged brokerages Nomura and Jefferies as advisers to mull its options following the attention of several potential buyers. G Network’s network passes 416,000 premises in the UK capital and it has reportedly raised hundreds of millions of pounds in debt and equity, including a funding of £85m from Universities Superannuation Scheme it had secured last month. The report comes as the so-called alternative network operator (altnet) sector in the UK is set for significant consolidation, with the most recent move being the agreed merger between Netomnia and Brsk.

Test and measurement vendor Keysight Technologies has become the latest company to join the AI-RAN Alliance, an industry body formed earlier this year that believes future radio access network (RAN) architectures need to be revamped to enable multiple, demanding workloads to run on a single platform. Giampaolo Tardioli, VP of 6G and next generation technology at Keysight, said: “With our deep expertise in simulation, modeling, and measurement science, Keysight will provide valuable solutions to accelerate the deployment of AI in the RAN and to improve accuracy and trustworthiness of the models of AI in the RAN. Joining the AI-RAN Alliance is a natural choice and another proof point of Keysight’s commitment in enabling innovation across the communication and computing industries. We look forward to collaborating with the other alliance members to help fully realise the potential of AI for wireless systems.” Read more.

- The staff, TelecomTV