Why Telecom Operators Are Building Their AI Strategy on Open Models
Telecom operators are increasingly basing their AI strategies on open models, according to NVIDIA's latest State of AI in Telecommunications report. The report found that 89% of respondents said open source models and software are important to their company's AI strategy.
NVIDIA said open models offer operators five strategic advantages: lower-cost access to frontier-level intelligence, support for telco-specific customization through open weights and training recipes, greater visibility and control over model artifacts and behavior for trustworthy AI, flexible deployment across public clouds, private infrastructure and edge environments, and the ability to deliver locally adapted AI services to enterprise and government customers. NVIDIA cited the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 as showing leading open models becoming more competitive across reasoning, coding, scientific and agentic workloads.
NVIDIA announced the 30-billion-parameter Nemotron 3 Large Telco Model (LTM), fine-tuned by AdaptKey on open source telecom datasets for telecom-specific tasks. NVIDIA also released a full recipe covering an end-to-end fine-tuning pipeline for adapting open models to operator-specific networks, customers and procedures using NVIDIA NeMo open libraries.
Rajeev Koodli, principal fellow of SoftBank Corp. and senior vice president of SB Telecom America, said SoftBank is using open foundations, including NVIDIA Nemotron models, in developing its SoftBank Large Telecom Model for use cases such as network operations, design and overall management. Andy Markus, chief data and AI officer of AT&T, said open models are essential to matching workloads to the right combination of performance, cost and control, and that AT&T works with NVIDIA to bring that strategy into production.
NVIDIA described an end-to-end platform powered by NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, spanning data pipelines, open models, agent orchestration, secure runtimes and simulation.
Chirag Sukhadia, chief data and AI officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, said the operator's Sahabat-AI family of open source models uses open models as a foundation to build AI that understands Indonesia and can be developed for local applications.
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Publisher excerpt
Telecom operators are increasingly building their AI strategies on open models — and the reasons go beyond mere cost. Open models give telcos the ability to trust, control and customize AI across their most critical workloads — from autonomous networks to customer care. NVIDIA’s latest State of AI in Telecommunications report reflects this shift, with […]