Data Center

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

Capital budgets already stretched across broadband and capacity are constraining room for GPU investment for the industry.

Akul Saxena

Akul Saxena

— 1 min read
AWS Says Telecoms Will Outsource AI Infrastructure as On-Premises Costs Prove Prohibitive
Photo of (from left) Abhishek Sandhir, managing director of Sand Corporation; Alec Mulonga, general manager of technology at Mobile Telephone Networks; Chika Ekeji, chief executive of MTN-i; and Ajay Ravindranathan, principal architect at AWS.

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. 

Post tagged in
Data Center MWC MWC2026 hyperscalers AWS Amazon Web Services Ajay Ravindranathan Alec Mulonga Mobile Telephone Networks GPU on prem

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