Key Highlights
- Bharti Airtel announces a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance Airtel Cloud infrastructure.
- The collaboration aims to serve regulated industries with secure, scalable, AI-ready cloud solutions.
- Airtel to expand its availability zones in India from four to ten and launch two new multizone regions.
- IBM’s AI and hybrid cloud technologies, including watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift, to power the platform.
- Partnership will support enterprises in banking, healthcare, government, and other sectors.
Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its recently launched Airtel Cloud platform. The collaboration is designed to combine Airtel’s telco-grade cloud infrastructure with IBM’s advanced hybrid cloud and AI technologies, aiming to deliver secure, scalable, and compliant cloud services for Indian enterprises.
Under this partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will gain access to IBM’s Power Systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the latest IBM Power11 AI-ready servers. These servers are optimized for mission-critical applications in sectors such as banking, healthcare, and government, and support workloads like IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, stated that the partnership will add significant new capabilities to Airtel Cloud. He highlighted plans to expand Airtel’s availability zones in India from four to ten, hosted in its sustainable next-generation data centers. Additionally, Airtel and IBM will establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai to enhance service resilience and compliance with data residency norms.
Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at IBM, emphasized that enterprises today face growing regulatory and AI-driven technology demands. He said the partnership with Bharti Airtel would enable Indian clients to modernize their IT infrastructure and accelerate digital transformation with IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI offerings.
The collaboration will leverage IBM’s watsonx AI platform and Red Hat OpenShift AI to deliver advanced AI inference capabilities across hybrid environments. These offerings are designed to help enterprises integrate generative AI into core workflows, improving operational efficiency and innovation potential.
Airtel’s expanded Multi Zone Regions will enable businesses to maintain operational continuity and meet regulatory data requirements while strengthening India’s digital infrastructure. The partnership is expected to support large-scale enterprise innovation and digital transformation initiatives nationwide.