A quick Friday news round-up, taking in telecoms and the wider AI infrastructure story. RCR Tech will also deal with the latter, so RCR Wireless shall deal with the former first. If you have been following Sean Kinney’s recent AI-RAN series, he has a new entry about brownfield open RAN transformation as a gateway to AI-RAN experimentation. Specifically, he discusses what Telus is doing with AI – for the RAN, in the first instance (with AI agents for certain operational tasks, to optimize flows and utilization), before AI in the RAN down the line. It has used an enforced hardware refresh to introduce virtualization, COTS compute, SMO, RIC, and programmable control – and, thus, ways to insert AI into its architecture. The Canadian firm’s approach is pragmatic, more credible than a wholesale rip-and-replace. Its key metric is spectrum efficiency, not AI for the sake of it. How do we deliver more data using the same spectrum asset? – it asks. The report works with Sean’s piece yesterday about T-Mobile’s AI-RAN twin-play in the US.

Otherwise, Deutsche Telekom has a de-riguer 4G/5G upgrade at a football stadium in Germany. Bayer 04 Leverkusen sounds better connected, for sure: 41 new antennas, connecting 30,000 fans on matchdays in prime low and mid-band spectrum, from 800 MHz to 3.6 GHz; five kilometers of new high-frequency cable; a shared set-up for other telcos; an ongoing small-cell densification project along routes to the stadium and in other areas. These upgrades are 10-a-penny these days, but the details are interesting. Meanwhile SpaceX is seeking more spectrum – as reported, and as discussed ad infinitum everywhere lately, including here. Also, Iliad Group in western Europe and United Group in southeastern Europe (in particular, which we haven’t covered much) have posted strong H1 results, highlighting the importance of regional challenger groups in the European telco landscape. Iliad continues to grow organically across France, Italy, and Poland, plus with sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure, while United is delivering double-digit growth across a portfolio of operators in Greece, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia.

Besides, on the straighter AI side, we have an OpenAI-led cybersecurity campaign, in the form of an open letter with a broad set of signatories (Anthropic, Arm, Broadcom, Cisco, Citi, DT, Equinix, General Motors, IBM, Lumen, Mastercard, Microsoft, NTT Data, Red Hat, SAP etc), to make cyber defense a collective effort as AI makes both attack and defense faster. There is a shrinking window in which defenders can use AI to harden systems before AI-enabled attacks become much more widespread and autonomous, they say. If AI can discover a vulnerability at machine speed, defenders need AI to develop a fix, test the fix, and deploy it at scale. The recent Hugging Face incident is clear enough. But OpenAI has a commercial interest, of course. The proposed solution is essentially to give defenders more capable models, such as its own. So it’s a commercial driver, as well, and the letter is advocacy, with broad recommendations about more government funding, information sharing, and corporate AI.

But the crisis is hardly in dispute. Corporate AI demand is outrunning supply forecasts. AWS had already planned more than a million Nvidia GPUs from 2026, and is now adding another two million for 2027/28 – because demand has exceeded expectations, notably among government agencies and big corporations, and with a keen eye on robotics besides. So what are we left with, this Friday lunch time? AI for AI networks, AI for AI security, AI for AI sovereignty, AI for AI robots – a self-perpetuating tech supply chain, and an infrastructure stack that must grow bigger, more distributed, more heterogeneous. AWS and Nvidia are also combining on CPUs, networking, memory, data processing, and robotics. The question for telcos, of course, is how that AI stack spills out of the data center and into the network, the factory, the warehouse, and the street. Telus and T-Mobile are asking what AI can do for spectrum utilization; but the telco questions are multiplying way beyond such parochial concerns.