Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications and digital infrastructure providers, has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to strengthen its Airtel Cloud platform and accelerate AI adoption across India’s enterprise landscape. The collaboration combines IBM’s expertise in hybrid cloud, AI infrastructure, and automation with Airtel’s telco-grade reliability, security, and local data residency.
The joint efforts would deliver advanced cloud and AI capabilities to businesses operating in highly regulated sectors.
The alliance comes at a time when India’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, and organizations are under increasing pressure to modernize infrastructure while ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. Through this partnership, Airtel and IBM aim to provide enterprises with seamless interoperability across on-premise, multi-cloud, and edge environments – key to scaling AI workloads effectively in industries such as government, healthcare, and financial services.
As part of the agreement, Airtel Cloud customers will gain access to IBM’s Power Systems portfolio as-a-service, including the new generation of AI-ready, autonomous IBM Power11 servers. These systems are designed for mission-critical workloads that demand high performance, reliability, and resilience. The hybrid Power11 platform will support enterprise applications such as SAP Cloud ERP, Linux, IBM Power AIX, and IBM i, providing enterprises with a secure foundation for digital transformation. SAP customers running on IBM Power will also benefit from a smoother transition to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server environments.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, said the collaboration represents a major step forward in expanding Airtel Cloud’s capabilities and reach. “Airtel Cloud is built as an agile, resilient, and highly secure platform that sets new benchmarks for compliance and reliability,” said Mr. Vittal. “By partnering with IBM, we’re enhancing our ability to serve industries that need to modernize mission-critical systems and prepare for AI-driven transformation. We’re expanding our availability zones in India from four to ten, using our sustainable data centers, and will soon launch two new Multizone Regions in Chennai and Mumbai.”
IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI Solutions
For IBM, the partnership deepens its role in India’s fast-growing enterprise technology ecosystem. Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at IBM, said the collaboration reflects a shared vision to balance modernization with regulatory demands. “Organizations today must find equilibrium between innovation and compliance,” said Mr. Thomas. “Together with Airtel, we’re bringing IBM’s advanced hybrid cloud and AI solutions to help Indian enterprises harness the full potential of emerging technologies while maintaining the highest levels of trust, security, and performance.”
Under the partnership, Indian enterprises will gain access to IBM’s AI inference stack, powered by Red Hat OpenShift AI and IBM Watsonx, enabling them to run AI workloads efficiently in hybrid cloud environments. The offering integrates IBM’s enterprise-grade IaaS and PaaS platforms with Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, including OpenShift AI and OpenShift Virtualization, allowing customers to build and deploy AI models securely across multiple environments. These solutions are designed to increase productivity, automate core business operations, and prepare organizations for future advances in areas such as quantum computing and generative AI.
Crucially, the partnership aligns with India’s focus on digital sovereignty and infrastructure resilience. Airtel’s Multizone Regions are designed to meet local data residency and compliance requirements while ensuring uninterrupted availability for mission-critical workloads. This is particularly significant for sectors bound by strict regulatory frameworks, where ensuring continuous uptime and data integrity is paramount.
Enterprise Modernization
The combined offering would position Airtel and IBM as key enablers of India’s next phase of digital and AI-driven growth. By uniting Airtel’s extensive connectivity network and sustainable data center infrastructure with IBM’s hybrid cloud, automation, and AI technologies, the partnership aims to accelerate enterprise modernization and innovation across the country.
In the broader context, the collaboration signals a growing trend in the Indian technology market: the convergence of telecommunications and cloud computing providers to deliver integrated digital infrastructure.
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