Europe’s sovereignty push looks urgent, almost desperate, and also coordinated and forceful. Deutsche Telekom has won a joint-tender with SAP from the Federal Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS) to build a local cloud system for government AI applications. French aerospace and defence group Thales is to build a sovereign cloud in the country to complement and also back-up its PREMI3NS facilities in France. See the story here.

Apart from the location and the logic, there is a common thread here in the shape of US-based Google Cloud – which withdrew legal objections about how the BMDS tender was evaluated and awarded, to clear approval for the DT/SAP win, and which is also directly involved in the Thales proposition, providing the underlying infrastructure and platform technology for a new Thales legal entity to manage on sovereign EU terms.

Meanwhile, analyst house STL Partners has a new report with the latest on the EU’s €20 billion AI ‘gigafactory’ initiative to fund up to five large-scale AI compute facilities to support frontier AI training with more than 100,000 GPUs per site. RCR wrote last week about Telefónica’s consortium bid for funds for a Spanish gigafactory. The narrative is, of course, about weaning the bloc of US (plus some Chinese) tech.

But commercial AI gigafactories are already being built “on European soil”, of course – by American firms with much deeper pockets. So it is an uphill task already – for European telcos, often engaged in EU gigafactory bides as minority partners, et al – even if momentum is building. And as STL notes, the clearer value for telcos sits a level down – in “serving” trained models to enterprises under EU compliance rules. Sovereign inference, in other words.

But you have to hand it to the Germans – and to Deutsche Telekom, decisive and ambitious, which is leading this whole story.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

RCR Top Stories

Sovereignty builds: Germany’s sovereign cloud push is advancing with Deutsche Telekom and SAP winning a BMDS AI platform tender and Thales expanding its Google Cloud model; STL Partners also has a good review of the state of things.

Airtel intros slicing: Indian telco Bharti Airtel has launched what it described as India’s first commercial 5G slicing service, as operators increasingly explore premium connectivity offerings and new 5G monetization strategies.

Dell on enterprise AI: As enterprises go from generative AI advisor to agentic AI operator, Dell is positioning storage, compute, cyber resilience, private cloud and automation as the enterprise control plane. Sean Kinney has the analysis for RCR.

Edge AI for defense: At the Defense Communications Forum, military operators and spectrum leaders laid out where edge AI and private 5G are deployable today – and where the process still lags the technology.

“Poor” and “cynical”: The GSMA and CTIA have misrepresented early 6GHz Wi-Fi adoption data to justify reallocating spectrum for mobile use, arguing the tech remains in a normal growth phase with good long-term value.

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Beyond the Headlines

Cali AI jobs review: California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an order examining AI job displacement, calling for workforce protections, retraining frameworks, and shared productivity gains.

A neocloud original: Cirrascale chief David Driggers chats to AI Tech Talks about his firm’s journey to be one of the first neoclouds dedicated to heavy-duty, bare metal hardware for AI training, and now shifting toward enterprise inferencing.

SpaceX – want in? SpaceX’s IPO filing reads like a techno-futurist manifesto – but then its his business: a vertically integrated empire of rockets, satellites, and AI infrastructure to scale intelligence globally.

5G-NTN for defense: 5G and NTNs are converging fast. NATO, the US Army, Airbus, and MSSA outlined at Defense Comms Forum where standards, deployments, and security sit today – and what 6G changes.

Snowflakes in AI storm: Telcos will never achieve full autonomy or change by layering AI agents on legacy systems, says TM Forum. Telcos are not special cases, it says. They must rebuild their IT and network foundations first.

What We’re Reading

About defense comms: Networks are the sensing, compute, and decision infra that defense missions depend on – in environments where spectrum is contested, where comms is a day-one target. Report from Defense Comms Forum.

Nokia AI networks lab: Nokia has opened a new AI networking lab in Sunnyvale, California, to drive co-innovation with AI and cloud partners and accelerate the development of next-generation networking technologies for AI infrastructure.

Ericsson private 5G lab: Ericsson has contributed a private 5G setup to a new manufacturing lab at manufacturing institute CNIMI in Canada to give startups a test environment to put their AI and automation cases through their paces.

Sub-Saharan FWA: NEC XON has expanded its African portfolio via Mimosa Networks, delivering carrier-grade FWA and backhaul solutions to underserved markets, helping operators deploy faster, lower-cost broadband.

New cyber tactics: Verizon’s new data breach report shows attackers are shifting tactics, with software vulnerabilities overtaking stolen credentials as the leading breach vector, while ransomware, AI attacks, and mobile phishing increase.

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