10 telco-hyperscaler partnerships from around the world

But this moved to ‘co-ompetition,’ and from there to productive bilateral partnerships across the sector. The result? Over 50% of telcos surveyed by TM Forum have a preferred relationship with one single hyperscale provider, with a further 12% keen on making one happen.

Here are some examples of telco-hyperscaler partnerships, covering everything from AI rollout to back-office OSS/BSS streamlining.

After a shift in focus from network functions to software and AI platforms, Microsoft has pursued telco partnerships to overhaul back-office and internal functions within these companies. One example is with Vodafone, which has deployed various Microsoft AI products (Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI Search) for its customer-facing and its internal operations.

As well as enhancing its customer-facing chatbot, Microsoft and Vodafone paired up to develop a new internal customer agent program called SuperAgent, which is available to human call centre operators to help them serve more customers concurrently. Vodafone piloted the software in one of its Italian call centres, where it has helped reduce average customer call times to under a minute.

In early 2025, Korean telco KT partnered with Naver, one of the country’s leading hyperscalers, to secure a 200 billion won ($150 million) contract to provide GPU as a service solutions for Hyundai’s self-drive subsidiary, with ChosunBiz reporting that it was KT’s hyperscale partnerships that swung the deal for Hyundai in terms of advanced AI offering. The project relates to developing an integrated software platform for Hyundai vehicle, allowing users to access GPUs on a subscription-based model.

Although little-known outside of its home market, Naver was a pioneer in AI, developing the world’s third-largest LLM in 2021, and is holding out as market leader against Google in the country’s search market. The company has also used its position to move into e-commerce, as well as LLM development and now telco partnerships to reach previously unavailable partnership options.

 

While dominating their home market, it is quite rare to see China’s hyperscalers partnering with international telcos – so a partnership announced at MWC 2025 between Tencent and Orange could be the start of a trend.

The partnership is based around Tencent’s ‘Super Cloud as a Service’ program (abbreviated by the company into SCaaS). Already used in a similar way by Indonesian telco Telkomsel, the app is designed to help companies develop ‘super-apps’ that integrate offerings like e-commerce, online payment, customer service and LLMs within one set of code across multiple platforms.

Orange has used Tencent’s SCaaS to develop its ‘Max It’ app, which combines telco-based services with e-commerce to allow customers to manage mobile and fixed line subscriptions, international money transfers, and a digital ticketing service. Developed primarily for Orange’s customers in Africa and the Middle East, the company is aiming for 45 million regular users by the end of 2025.

 

This partnership is an outlier in the list, but it shows the collaboration currently happening in the hyperscaler-telco vendor space too.

June 2025 saw Ericsson launch Ericsson On-Demand, the Swedish vendor’s core-as-a-service platform which uses software-defined networking to help telcos provision, scale, and pay flexibly for network services according to requirements. Although managed end-to-end by the vendor, the system is built on Google Cloud’s data centre, cloud, and fibre infrastructure, while making use of Google Kubernetes Engine for managing autoscaling on the hosting side.

 

Vodafone has been more willing than most telcos to embrace hyperscale partnerships, particularly the kind of long-term, one-telco-one-hyperscaler partnership that is currently dominating the landscape in this area.

2024 saw the telco sign two multi-year hyperscaler partnerships within the same year. First came a ten-year partnership with Microsoft focused on customer experience, which used Microsoft’s generative AI offerings to improve call centre efficiency at the same time as using the hyperscaler’s reach to grow Vodafone’s managed IoT connectivity platform.

10 months later, Vodafone then combined with Google for a strategic partnership of similar length with Microsoft around the same time. This link-up focuses on using Google’s Gemini models to bolster various Vodafone services, including enhancing search and recommendations for Vodafone TV and delivering AI assistance internally.

When announcing the partnership, the two companies emphasised the mutual benefit of the partnership for both sides, rather than being a case of a telco buying a hyperscaler’s services – the agreement will also see Google using Vodafone’s connectivity reach to improve the productivity of its own workforce.

 

Like all telcos of its market position, BT works with a gargantuan amount of customer, employee, and operational data, with large code requirements to match, and a hyperscaler partnership has been a vital part of simplifying this.

BT turned to Amazon’s CodeWhisperer platform to take some of the tedium out of coding for the company’s engineers – and as a result, 100,000 lines of code were automatically generated in just four months of operation, resulting in a 12% reduction in workload and allowing software developers to dedicate their time to more strategic, value-added projects.

As AWS’s Director Telco Industry Fabio Cerone put it; “For BT Group, it helps the engineering community to finish coding tasks faster, allowing them to focus on the bigger picture of how they deliver the very best solutions for the business and their customers.”

 

Telefónica is another telco with huge data requirements, and the telco turned to Microsoft Azure to make sense of it using various data processing and analysis tools.

Unlike other partnerships in this list, the Telefonica/Microsoft Azure link-up in this instance was focused on data analysis and network optimisation, rather than moving workloads or shifting actual network architecture around. The telco made use of various Microsoft tools, including Azure Data Explorer for exploration, Azure Databricks for analytics, and Power BI for visualisation. According to Telefónica, the additional automation has led to both cost savings and better insights into network performance, resulting in more room for the telco to focus on improving quality of service in general.

 

US network services provider Lumen partnered with AWS in late 2024 in another example of a telco-hyperscaler partnership that helps both parties.

As part of the deal, there is an exchange of services. AWS provides its AI, machine learning and security technologies to improve Lumen’s network performance, with the provider also moving its IT and product platforms to AWS. For its part, Lumen will supply dedicated, private fibre links to AWS data centres, linking the hyperscaler’s regions and local zones. With fibre access to data centres becoming more of a challenge, this is one way telcos can gain leverage in hyperscaler partnership negotiations.

Read more: Lumen partners with AWS to enhance AI, network, and fibre capabilities

 

Belgian telco Proximus signed a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft in June 2024, with a similar theme to other partnerships in the past year – the telco provides network reach, the hyperscaler provides AI expertise and products.

A unique factor in this partnership is the attractivity of Proximus’s digital identical and CPaaS services, which piqued the interest of the hyperscaler – Microsoft will make use of the telco’s Telesign operation to enhance security across its products. In return, Proximus will migrate workloads to Azure as part of its digital transformation, including providing development environments for the company’s engineers, as well as bolstering the telco’s role as a leading reseller of Microsoft services across its customer network.

 

Bell Canada is another telco that has made use of hyperscaler expertise and products to smooth out its contact centre operations. The company collaborated with Google Cloud to deploy AI-based solutions within its customer service points. These enhance customer interactions through automated conversational agents and Agent Assist tools, providing real-time sentiment analysis and offering live help to human operators.

To date, according to Bell Canada, the partnership has resulted in $20 million of savings in customer operations through 1.1million virtual assistant interactions annually, thus dramatically improving service quality and cost-effectiveness.

  

The need for telcos to improve their service offerings and find new revenue streams – whether through hyperscaler partnerships or by other means – has never been as pressing as it is now. Capacity Europe 2025 is the place to learn about how telcos are doing this – where 3,000+ delegates come to London in October to plot the course of the European connectivity market. Get your pass here and save £450!