BERLIN – Nvidia continues to push beyond its traditional wheelhouse and into the telecom space with plans to help some of the European market’s biggest names build so-called sovereign AI factories.

At the vendor’s GTC event in Germany’s capital, it confirmed that around 10 telecom operators in EMEA had signed on to use its accelerated computing hardware to power everything from industrial AI clouds to AI-native radio access networks (AI-RAN).

Ian Buck, Nvidia’s VP and GM of hyperscale and high-performance computing, said in a press briefing that the telecom opportunity represents a “new path to market” to expand AI infrastructure and services across Europe.

Having already invested $1 billion in Nokia, Nvidia detailed at its event that the likes of Deutsche Telekom, BT, and Orange have trialed GPU-accelerated platforms or hosted Nemotron open models to unlock their own new business models through AI.

Buck suggested that some 20% of the continent’s data centers are owned by telco companies, a number that rises to more than 1,500 “if we expand to the edge.”

Intelligence is built in five layers: land, power and shell, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. Telecom operators already own sovereign infrastructure at the first layer, with data centers, regional sites and cell sites that have power, fiber and spectrum.

Nvidia argues that telecom operators are ripe for supporting infrastructure that’s inherently sovereign in that they “already own sovereign infrastructure at the first layer, with data centers, regional sites and cell sites that have power, fiber and spectrum.”

“The media telecom operators are turning their networks into AI service platforms with Nvidia, and we're working with them across all of the countries: Italy, Georgia, Serbia, even Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic,” the exec added.

Nvidia pushing into telecoms is not a new story, with it having already conducted AI-driven network optimization efforts with KDDI and co-developed the AITRAS platform to apply AI to 5G networks alongside SoftBank, among earlier examples.

At GTC in Germany, the vendor said the country’s largest carrier, Deutsche Telekom, was planning on expanding its Nvidia-powered industrial AI cloud platform, which hosts open models for physical AI applications, like robotics. The carrier is tapping Nvidia’s Arc server lines, like the Blackwell-based RTX Pro 6000, to run inference between the device and the network edge.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we are shaping the future by integrating AI where it makes a real difference and

bringing intelligence closer to where it is needed. For example, to the high-tech industries of tomorrow,” DT CEO Tim Höttges said in a statement. “Companies perform at their best when they have the best network and the smartest AI at their disposal. Together with NVIDIA, we’re making that happen.”

Meanwhile, French giant Orange was listed as having introduced new voice intelligence services for enterprises and emergency responders, while Finnish telecom Elisa tapped Nvidia to conduct what was alleged to be Europe’s first field trial of AI-RAN, “running voice, mobile data and vision AI together on a single accelerated computing platform over 5G.”