AWS Says Telecoms Will Outsource AI Infrastructure as On-Premises Costs Prove Prohibitive

BARCELONA, March 5, 2026 — AWS, the cloud computing division of Amazon, said telecommunications operators are shifting from manual to autonomous network operations and will increasingly depend on outside cloud infrastructure to run artificial intelligence workloads, the company’s principal architect said Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Ajay Ravindranathan, AWS's principal solutions architect for telecommunications, said the transition requires application programming interfaces, standardized software connections that allow different systems to exchange information, to be embedded at every layer of network operations. He said that architecture would replace human-monitored dashboards with automated systems that manage traffic, faults, and capacity without intervention.

Ravindranathan said most operators will run large-scale AI model training on cloud infrastructure. A smaller share of computing power will stay inside their own facilities - known as "on-prem" infrastructure —-for data that cannot leave due to regulatory or sovereignty requirements.