LIVE FROM VIVATECH PARIS, FRANCE: Orange Business, Telefonica, Telenor, Fastweb and Swisscom were held up by Nvidia as making fresh moves with the vendor to increase availability of local and secure AI infrastructure for enterprises in Europe.
The projects were detailed in one of a staggering number of announcements made today (11 June) by the US tech company, whose CEO Jensen Huang spoke at an event in the same venue.
Nvidia’s collaborations with the quintet vary in scope, but shared the common theme of being around meeting demand for sovereign AI.
The pact with Orange Business sees the French company join Nvidia’s cloud partner programme and gain access to its infrastructure for users of the operator’s Live Intelligence enterprise platform.
Orange Business director of AI products Mathieu Ducrot told Mobile World Live the strategic collaboration with Nvidia aims to “deliver sovereign AI to Europe”.
He added its “Live Intelligence platform today relies mainly on public models and we aim, thanks to this partnership, to benefit from the latest technologies provided by Nvidia to be able to enhance our trusted platform”.
Its ambition is to be able to “deliver the most demanding” AI models within data centres not exposed to external laws.
New applications
Nvidia’s deal with Telenor involves the operator expanding the capacity of its AI infrastructure in Norway, including the addition of a data centre running entirely on renewable energy.
The operator also plans to integrate the US vendor’s AI software into products to “accelerate enterprise adoption and deployment of generative and agentic AI applications”, Nvidia highlighted.
In Spain, it noted Telefonica is piloting distributed edge AI infrastructure in a bid to bring “advanced computing closer to where data is generated and where local AI inference is needed”.
As part of this drive, the operator is apparently set to deploy hundreds of the vendor’s GPUs.
Elsewhere, Nvidia noted Swisscom “recently” launched a number of enterprise AI services using sovereign infrastructure on its kit, while Italian fixed operator Fastweb used its infrastructure for a newly launched Italian language AI model.