Today, we have an interesting opinion piece by TelcoDR and Totogi CEO Danielle Rios, who delves into the “telco-to-techco” shift AI should represent for telcos, but might not, because many are repeating the same mistakes of the past.

In her piece, “SK’s Take,” Rios breaks down Morningstar’s reclassification of SK Telecom as an “AI stock,” which rapidly expanded its P/E from 11x to 60x, showing that “the market rewards ownership of the AI platform layer.” 

She contends the time has come for telcos to abandon the playbook of the ’90s and 2000s, building infrastructure for others to capitalize on (in this case, for AI workloads, as they did for voice and data). She believes there’s more to do than become “landlords for someone else’s AI.”

As Rios points out, telcos pumped hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars into fiber and broadband infrastructure, only to see their investments commoditized so that Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other OTT players could build their fortunes on top. That left telcos with single-digit P/E multiples. 

In her opinion, the time has come for telcos to realize that “AI is more than another workload to host or another tool to run through procurement.” She points to the assets they have that no one else has – not even the hyperscalers – in real-time network data across hundreds-of-millions of connections, billing relationships, location and behavioral data at population scale, and deep operational knowledge of networks, services, and customer interactions.

According to Rios, “That’s the foundation of an AI platform only a telco could build.”

See what else she says, in today’s RCRTech Reader Forum.

Reader Forum – SKs take: Have you noticed SK Telecom is now considered an AI stock after a recategorization by Morningstar? After SKT wrote a $100M check for equity in Anthropic (@ $5 billion valuation), it triggered a “telco-to-techco” shift.

KKR on land, power & more: Raj Agrawal says that building AI infrastructure requires more than capital investment, pointing to the importance of securing land, power, and other resources needed to develop new facilities.

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