BARCELONA, March 2, 2026 — Leads & Copy —
GSMA has launched Open Telco AI, a global industry initiative aimed at accelerating telco-grade AI through open collaboration. The initiative seeks to unite operators, vendors, AI developers, and academic institutions to foster the development and evaluation of AI models tailored for the telecommunications sector.
The launch includes a new portal that provides access to telco open models, data, compute resources, and tools, all accessible via GSMA.com/open-telco-ai. This collaborative environment intends to address the underperformance of current frontier AI models in telecom-specific tasks.
According to GSMA, general-purpose models often struggle with interpreting network data, understanding standards documentation, and automating network operations with sufficient accuracy. Only 16% of telecoms GenAI deployments have been applied to network operations.
Open Telco AI aims to resolve this issue by creating a foundation of telco-grade AI models, data, compute resources, benchmarks, and a collaborative community. The initiative’s progress will be tracked through the Telco Capability Index, which measures model performance across various telecom-specific tasks.
AT&T and AMD are founding supporters of Open Telco AI. AT&T is contributing a family of open telco-models developed and trained on publicly available data, designed to be hardware and cloud-agnostic. AMD is providing compute capacity for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and evaluation through its GPU platforms, cloud partner TensorWave, and open toolchains.
The initiative is also supported by community programs that bring together developers, researchers, and operators to address telecom-AI challenges. These include competitions like the AI Telco Troubleshooting Challenge, which attracted over 1,000 registrations.
Louis Powell, Director of AI Initiatives at GSMA, stated that current AI models do not meet the telecom industry’s demands for complexity, precision, and reliability. He emphasized the need for clear benchmarks and industry collaboration on datasets, models, and agentic systems.
Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at AMD, noted the demanding and regulated nature of telco networks for AI. He highlighted AMD’s role in delivering the compute needed to train and run open, telco-grade models efficiently.
Andy Markus, Chief Data and AI Officer at AT&T, said that the telecom industry requires AI that understands network realities, not just repurposed generic models. He detailed AT&T’s contribution to building datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks to enable telco-grade AI at scale.
The new portal will support the co-creation of essential building blocks for telco-grade AI, including:
- Telco Models: High-performance open weight models designed for telecom tasks, including models from AT&T, RFGPT from Khalifa University, and a Large Telco Model (LTM) from AdaptKey AI.
- Open Data: A library of knowledge graphs, embeddings, and fine-tuning datasets from various institutions, including GSMA, Huawei Technologies France, Khalifa University, Mantis NLP, NetoAI, Pleias, Purdue University, The University of Texas at Dallas, University of Leeds and Yale University, and pipelines for generating synthetic data from NVIDIA.
- Compute: Access to compute and open toolchains via AMD and TensorWave.
- Benchmarks: A leaderboard assessing model performance on seven telecom-specific benchmarks.
- Community: Resources, challenges, and engagement activities to encourage collaboration.
The Open Telco AI initiative has several contributing partners, including AMD, AT&T, Datumo, Huawei Technologies France, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KDDI, Khalifa University, KPN, LGU+, Mantis NLP, NetoAI, North Carolina State University, NVIDIA Orange, Ooredoo, Pleias, Purdue University, RelationalAI, SK Telecom, Softbank, Swisscom, TensorWave, Turkcell, University of Leeds, University of Texas at Dallas, and Yale University. Participant partners include Adaptive ML, BMC, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, DU, e& UAE, Google Cloud, IBM, Liberty Global, Queens University, Telefónica and Vodafone.
For more information, visit GSMA.com/open-telco-ai.
[1] Source: GSMA Intelligence, Telco AI: State of the Market, Q4 2025, (published January 2026)
The GSMA is a global organisation unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change.
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Source: GSMA
