ABI Research says market driven by demand from enterprises and governments’ sovereignty requirements – SoftBank, Reliance Jio, Telenor, TELUS, Ooredoo are in the vanguard
One way telcos globally can expand their business beyond connectivity is to become the backbone of AI infrastructure for national or regional AI demand, according to ABI Research. The research firm predicts that the telco industry will generate more than $21 billion (€18.1 billion) in revenues from GPU-aa-a-Service (GPUaaS) by 2030. This will be driven by enterprises’ continued, rising demand for GPU compute and governments’ requirement of AI sovereignty.
In an AI factory near you
As of Q1 2025, 17 telcos had announced or built NVIDIA AI factories, which can be used for internal workloads and GPUaaS offerings. They include SoftBank, Reliance Jio, Telenor, TELUS, Ooredoo and others. Most of the AI factories announced by NVIDIA are in the Asia-Pacific region, followed by Europe and the Middle East and Africa markets.
Also see Orange, Swisscom, Telefónica and Telenor join NVIDIA in European AI infra push
and DT and NVIDIA to build industrial AI cloud in Germany by 2026 latest
As the buildout continues and telcos mature in their capabilities to offer distributed GPU compute, 2027 is expected to be the inflection point at which telcos’ GPUaaS revenue begins to grow rapidly.
Early stages
“While the telco GPUaaS market is still at an incredibly early stage, there is…momentum behind the buildout of AI factories and upgrading existing data center portfolios to better support AI workloads,” says Larbi Belkhit, Industry Analyst at ABI Research.
“Demand for access to GPU compute continues to grow, but alongside that is a growing necessity for AI sovereignty and telcos are extremely well positioned to be the preferred and trusted partner for national or regional AI inferencing workloads.”
He concludes, “While highly regulated and sovereign-sensitive verticals are prime opportunities, GPUaaS is merely a gateway to a much wider AI monetization strategy for telcos. Developing AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) offerings will strengthen their value proposition compared to other cloud providers who are heavily reliant on GPU demand for their business model.”
These findings are from ABI Research’s The Telco GPUaaS Opportunity report. This report is part of the company’s Telco AI research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights.
Image courtesy of Telenor, shows its AI factory launched in 2024
