New Delhi: Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to deliver the American tech company’s cloud and AI services through Airtel’s recently launched Airtel Cloud platform.
The collaboration aims to cater to the growing demand for secure and scalable cloud solutions amid India’s rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and data localisation requirements.
Under the partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will gain access to IBM’s advanced offerings, including AI-ready servers tailored for regulated sectors such as banking, healthcare and government.
Bharti Airtel’s Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Gopal Vittal, said the collaboration enhances Airtel Cloud’s ability to support industry-specific migration from IBM Power Systems and improve AI readiness.
“With the IBM partnership, we are adding substantial capabilities to our Cloud platform to address the unique needs of several industries,” Vittal said, adding that Airtel will also expand its availability zones in India from four to ten, hosted in its own next-generation, sustainable data centres.
This announcement comes soon after Google announced a $15 billion investment to set up an AI data centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam, in partnership with Airtel.
