• Bell Canada, Nvidia among Cohere’s latest investors
• Jio Platforms completes IPO and reports fiscal Q2 sales growth of 11.3%
• T-Mobile US rules out SpaceX MVNO deal

In today’s industry news roundup: Canadian AI developer is seeking to raise C$7bn and has already attracted commitments from a range of investors, including Bell Ventures, Nvidia and Germany’s increasingly influential Schwarz Group; India’s Jio Platforms has completed a successful IPO and reported an 11.3% year on year increase in revenues for its latest quarter; T-Mobile US has no plans to welcome SpaceX as an MVNO customer; and much more!

Bell Canada’s investment arm, Bell Ventures, and Nvidia are among the companies to have committed to a new funding round for Canadian sovereign AI developer Cohere, which is seeking to raise C$7bn (US$5bn) at a company valuation of C$35.7bn (US$25.54bn). Cohere has raised some of its Series E round total so far, with Schwarz Group, “one of Europe's largest investors in AI and cloud infrastructure”, as the lead investor, and with commitments from Bullhound Capital, the Government of Canada, Inovia Capital and Prosperity7 Ventures, as well as Bell Ventures and Nvidia. “The round marks the largest private financing round ever undertaken by a Canadian technology company and underscores a broader global shift toward sovereign AI,” noted Cohere. “As AI becomes increasingly mission-critical, organizations are seeking independent alternatives that provide greater control over their data, infrastructure, governance, and deployment environments,” it added. The funding will “advance product development across Cohere's model portfolio and full–stack platform, which saw its biggest upgrade yet this year with the launch of North 2.” It added that in 2026,  “Cohere introduced new models and capabilities across generation, search, speech, code, and translation, including Command A+, Cohere Transcribe, Parse 5, Embed 5, Rerank 5, North Mini Code, and North Small Translate”. Bell Canada has been working closely with Cohere on the development of its Bell AI Fabric and in June this year the telco teamed up with Cohere, AI computer infrastructure developer Hypertec and BUZZ High Performance Computing (HPC), a subsidiary of Hive Digital Technologies, to announce “a major AI infrastructure deal, marking a significant step forward in the development and deployment of advanced AI workloads on sovereign Canadian infrastructure,” the Canadian telco announced.  

That Schwarz Group is leading Cohere’s latest round is not a surprise: The German company earlier this year committed to invest €500m in Cohere’s next financing round as part of a merger agreement between Cohere and German AI firm Aleph Alpha, in which Schwarz Group has been a major investor: Schwarz also committed to partner with the combined company to deploy a “sovereign offering” on Stackit, its cloud platform that is also being used for the development of innovative telecom applications. (The merger agreement between Cohere and Aleph Alpha was signed in September and is close to completion but still requires some regulatory approvals.) Christian Müller, CEO of the German firm’s digital division, Schwarz Digits, stated: "The companies of Schwarz Group are proud to lead Cohere's Series E investment at a pivotal moment for AI, where digital sovereignty has become a strategic imperative for global competitiveness. Digital sovereignty is about strategic choice, interoperability and holding the keys to our own data. Following the [almost completed] strategic business combination of Cohere and Aleph Alpha, this investment marks the next logical milestone on a roadmap that we have methodically built: uniting European research excellence and explainability with global enterprise scale. Our partnership brings together Canadian AI leadership and trusted European infrastructure, giving customers greater choice and control over how they deploy secure AI. Our clear goal is to anchor these frontier capabilities in our sovereign Stackit cloud infrastructure. We are excited to support its continued growth across Europe and around the world."

Following its successful IPO on 28 October, Jio Platforms (JPL), the digital division of giant Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), has reported another quarter of notable growth. For the three months to the end of September (its fiscal second quarter), Jio Platforms – which counts India’s leading telco Reliance Jio as its main business unit – generated revenues of 478.85bn rupees ($5bn), up by 11.3% year on year, while its EBITDA was up by 16.6% to 218.79bn rupees ($2.31bn). According to RIL, Jio ended September with 542 million customers across its range of services, including 300 million 5G and more than 30 million fixed broadband customers. The long-planned IPO raised $3.18bn for Jio Platforms at a valuation of around $106bn, but the share price immediately jumped by more than 21% to value Jio Platforms at more than $131bn. RIL’s chairman and managing director, Mukesh Ambani, stated: “This week marked a historic moment in Reliance’s value creation journey with Jio’s record-setting listing on Indian bourses. With over 22x subscription, and strong listing appreciation, the issue has set multiple global benchmarks. JPL is now India’s second largest company. It demonstrates the depth of confidence investors place in Jio’s solid foundation and strong growth visibility.” 

With industry watchers trying to figure out quite how Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to become a serious rival to the major US telcos via its Starlink Mobile operation – with many deciding that a national MVNO deal will be needed to supplement the planned deployment by SpaceX of a terrestrial small cell network – T-Mobile US has made it clear that it has no intention of having SpaceX become an MVNO customer. Speaking on the US telco’s latest earnings call, T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan noted that the operator’s “MVNO philosophy has fundamentally not changed… The way we think about it is – does an MVNO give us access to incremental TAM [total addressable market]? Does it give us access to new distribution channels? Does it give us incremental capability of any sort? And we've been very clear that in terms of satellite, we see it as a complementary product. And therefore, we don't really see the room for an MVNO for satellite, or SpaceX, in that context.” And he doesn’t feel there wil be any need to hook up with Starlink for any physical or edge AI plans either. “We're steaming ahead and building our 5G SA as well as rolling into 6G – we see ourselves a lead in terms of those capabilities. And we see no space for an MVNO here because, well, what additional capabilities does it give us? Why does it change our ability to compete? If we're talking about SpaceX as a customer or us being a customer of them, that's a purely commercial agreement. But… I see no room for an MVNO with SpaceX either on the consumer side or on the physical and edge AI side.” That’s pretty clear!

KPN has acquired Dutch converged communications software developer Xelion for an undisclosed sum and will integrate the Delft-based company into the part of the telco’s B2B division that targets small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). “With the acquisition, KPN brings in a Dutch technology company that develops software for business communication,” the telco stated. “Xelion offers companies a single platform for calling, messaging, video calling, and customer contact. The acquisition fits KPN's strategy to help entrepreneurs work smarter and simplify customer contact,” it added. Xelion has developed a platform that, via a single application, enables a company’s employees to make audio and video calls, chat, and communicate via WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and CRM systems. The kove is part of KPN’s efforts to provide enterprises with simple digital solutions and adds to the Dutch telco’s introduction earlier this year of Mobile AI, which enables businesses to use AI in their daily communication via their mobile phones. “In the long term, Xelion's technology offers new opportunities to further connect communication, customer contact, and AI support. At the same time, the partnership with KPN offers opportunities to grow further together by combining Xelion's innovative power with KPN's reach and distribution strength,” the telco added. 

French tech giant Bull has teamed up with Czech telecom and digital infrastructure operator České Radiokomunikace (CRA) to “develop a sovereign AI offering designed to accelerate AI adoption across the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe” and join the Czech firm’s AI Gigafactory consortium. According to Bull, the “collaboration brings together CRA’s infrastructure expertise and Bull’s capabilities across AI systems, software and services, strengthening the consortium led by CRA in its candidacy under the European AI Gigafactories programme. The Czech AI Gigafactory initiative is open to serve and incorporate companies from broader Central and Eastern European countries in accordance with the Prague declaration, in which nine CEE countries have committed to greater coordination on European AI policy, computing infrastructure and sharing of best practices: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Romania,” noted Bull. CRA’s CEO Miloš Mastník stated: "Our ambition is to build an ecosystem in the Czech Republic that combines computing infrastructure with the development and practical use of artificial intelligence. The Memorandum of Understanding with Bull opens up opportunities for cooperation in both hardware and software – the two key components of an AI Gigafactory. We want international and Czech companies, public administrations and researchers to be able to develop their own AI solutions here, helping the Czech Republic become a major centre for artificial intelligence in Europe." Bull’s CEO Emmanuel Le Roux added: “AI Gigafactories are where Bull’s hardware, AI software and expertise in real-world AI applications come together. Joining the Czech consortium is an important step in our European AI strategy and further strengthens the Czech-French cooperation at its heart, building on the expertise of our 200 DataSentics AI engineers in Prague and Brno. It reflects the kind of AI we want to build in Europe: open, sustainable and sovereign to give organisations greater control over their technology and data.”

– The staff, TelecomTV