Bharti Airtel has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance Airtel Cloud services.
NEW DELHI, MUMBAI, and ARMONK, NY, October 28, 2025 — Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its recently launched Airtel Cloud. This collaboration aims to combine Airtel Cloud’s telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency with IBM’s expertise in cloud solutions and advanced infrastructure and software technologies for AI inference.
Together, Airtel and IBM will help enterprises in regulated industries efficiently scale AI workloads, providing seamless interoperability across on-premises, cloud, multiple clouds, and edge environments.
Through this partnership, Airtel Cloud customers will be able to deploy the IBM Power systems portfolio as a service. This includes the latest-generation IBM Power11 autonomous, AI-ready servers designed for mission-critical applications in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and government. The Power11 hybrid platform will also support essential enterprise workloads, including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP. Furthermore, this partnership will assist SAP customers on IBM Power in their enterprise resource planning transformation to SAP Cloud ERP on the IBM Power Virtual Server.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, stated, “Airtel Cloud is designed to be highly secure and compliant, setting new industry benchmarks as an agile and resilient cloud platform. With our partnership with IBM, we are significantly enhancing our Cloud platform to meet the specific needs of industries migrating from IBM Power systems and to ensure AI readiness. Additionally, we are expanding the number of our availability zones in India from four to ten, hosting these services in our next-generation sustainable data centers. Together, we will also soon establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai.”
Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at IBM, stated, “Enterprises today must balance modernization with increasing regulatory requirements related to technology and AI. Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India can use IBM’s innovative cloud solutions tailored to workloads aligned with their strategic business priorities. Together, we will assist clients in achieving genuine transformation in the era of AI.”
Based in India, Airtel is a global provider of communication solutions, serving over 600 million customers across 15 countries, including India and Africa. The company also operates in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka through its associate entities.
IBM assists clients in over 175 countries in leveraging data insights to streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain a competitive advantage in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate organizations in vital sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare depend on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to implement digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely.
Source: IBM
— CitiTimes editor holds Professional Certificates in ‘AI Basics Mastery’ and ‘Generative AI for Data Engineering’ from IBM.
CitiTimes 