Bharti Airtel has entered a strategic Airtel IBM partnership to augment its recently launched Airtel Cloud with advanced AI and hybrid cloud capabilities. The collaboration brings together Airtel’s telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency with IBM’s leadership in cloud solutions and AI-ready infrastructure.
This partnership aims to enable enterprises in regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and government to scale AI workloads efficiently across on-premise, cloud, multi-cloud, and edge environments.
Through the Airtel IBM partnership, customers will gain access to IBM Power systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the latest IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers for mission-critical applications.
The Power11 hybrid platform supports critical enterprise workloads including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP. This enables SAP customers to seamlessly transform their enterprise resource planning systems to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, emphasized that Airtel Cloud is designed to be highly secure and compliant, setting new industry benchmarks. He stated that the IBM partnership adds substantial capabilities to address the unique needs of industries requiring migration from IBM Power systems while ensuring AI readiness. Airtel is also expanding its availability zones in India from four to ten, hosting them on next-gen sustainable data centers.
The Airtel IBM partnership will establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai, strengthening resilience and addressing data residency requirements for Indian enterprises. MZRs distribute cloud infrastructure across physical locations in different zones, ensuring data and operations remain safe and uninterrupted during regional faults. This architecture helps businesses keep mission-critical workloads and applications running seamlessly at all times.
IBM’s software stack for AI inferencing, built on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, enables clients in India to run AI inference across hybrid cloud environments. These capabilities are coupled with IBM’s enterprise-grade cloud platform offering innovative Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. IBM’s automation portfolio accelerates the impact of generative AI in core enterprise workflows to drive productivity gains.
Customers will access Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions including Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat AI through this partnership. Rob Thomas, SVP and Chief Commercial Officer at IBM, noted that enterprises today need to balance modernization with growing regulated technology and AI requirements. The Airtel IBM partnership helps clients across India leverage innovative cloud offerings designed to address strategic business priorities.
The collaboration positions both companies to capitalize on India’s rapidly expanding demand for cloud services driven by artificial intelligence adoption and data localization requirements.
This announcement comes shortly after Google announced a $15 billion investment over five years to establish an AI data center in Andhra Pradesh, in partnership with Airtel. The surge in cloud infrastructure investments reflects India’s emergence as a critical market for enterprise technology solutions.
Beyond immediate AI and cloud capabilities, IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture is designed to help clients enable future innovation in emerging technologies like quantum computing. The Airtel IBM partnership represents a significant step in India’s digital transformation journey, providing enterprises with secure, scalable, and compliant infrastructure for deploying next-generation AI applications. Indian businesses across sectors will benefit from enhanced resilience, regulatory compliance, and accelerated innovation.
The strategic Airtel IBM partnership strengthens Airtel’s position as a major player in India’s cloud and AI ecosystem while expanding IBM’s footprint in one of the world’s fastest-growing technology markets. Together, the companies aim to drive true transformation in the era of AI by delivering integrated solutions that meet the complex requirements of regulated industries while enabling innovation at scale.
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