What’s up with… EU AI gigafactories, SK Telecom, Singtel

• EU seeks tenders for €20bn AI gigafactories
• SK Telecom launches new AI model with 32% performance boost
• Singtel is in talks over sale of minority stake in Optus

In today’s industry news roundup: European Commission issues a call for tenders for its €20bn AI gigafactory project; SK Telecom’s new foundational AI model aims to transform AI usage in everyday life and across industry; Singtel opens exclusive talks with Morrison over a 30% stake in Aussie telco Optus; and much more!

The European Commission is seeking tenders to establish up to seven AI gigafactories across the continent as part of a major push to accelerate European technological sovereignty. The EU has launched a call for tenders to publicly finance the large-scale compute facilities, which will be backed by up to €10bn in EU and national funding. The gigafactories will combine advanced AI processors, software and cloud with high-speed connectivity and energy-efficient datacentres. They will operate alongside Europe’s existing network of 19 AI factories as the region looks to position itself at the forefront of AI advancements, in direct competition with the US and China. The split of the funding is a bit murky, though. The European Commission initially appeared to commit €20bn for the gigafactories, but it has scaled this back to the €10bn figure mentioned and, even then, around half of this is expected to come from national governments. Of the €5bn expected to come from Brussels, only €1bn will be committed under its current budget, with the remainder coming from the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), which is yet to be finalised. Each gigafactory would house at least 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips, making it roughly four times more powerful than the largest datacentres running in the EU today. Ten countries have expressed interest in hosting a gigafactory: Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Both single-country and multi-country consortia are possible. Last year, the EU revealed that more than 60 locations had been suggested by no fewer than 76 bidders, including several telcos. Reports emerged, for example, that Telefónica and MasOrange are part of a consortium hoping to win a concession for a large-scale AI datacentre in Spain. One challenge that the continent faces, however, is the availability of high-powered AI computer chips. In its announcement, the EC said it has signed three letters of intent with major US hardware providers, AMD, NVIDIA and Qualcomm to “ensure consortia have seamless access to necessary hardware.” The call for tenders will close on 12 November and the award decisions are expected to be announced in early 2027.

SK Telecom has taken the wraps off its new foundational AI model, which aims to support transformation across everyday life and industry. A.X K2 is to be made available through the open-source community Hugging Face and will deliver “enhanced mathematical and scientific reasoning”, according to the South Korean telco giant. It also operates in Korean and has long-context reasoning capabilities. SKT said it had seen an average performance gain of 32.2% across 14 benchmarks when compared with its previous A.X K1 model, with strong gains of around 83% in long-context understanding and agent-related evaluations. When compared to other models, the telco experienced comparable performances with DeepSeek V4 Flash or Qwen 3.5-397B on mathematical and Korean language benchmarks. SKT outlined a number of expected use cases for the model, including in manufacturing AI, defence, biological sciences, and enterprise agents. “We have advanced a range of capabilities in parallel to enable broad use across everyday life, offices and manufacturing sites,” said Kim Tae-yoon, head of Foundation Model Office at SKT. “We will continue expanding the adoption of A.X K2 across industries to help drive Korea’s AI competitiveness,” he added.

Singtel is in talks to offload a stake in its Australian operator Optus to infrastructure investment firm Morrison, according to local reports. The Australian Financial Review, citing unnamed sources, reported that Singtel – which has been the sole owner of Optus since 2001 – is looking to sell as much as 30% of the company to New Zealand-based Morrison, which has assembled a consortium of Australian bidders. According to the report, former Telstra CEO Andy Penn (who left the Australian incumbent in 2022) has been brought on board to help close a deal, alongside ex-Vodafone New Zealand chairman Brett Chenoweth. The deal for a share of Australia’s second-largest carrier could be worth around AUS $2bn, and Morrison – which just this week announced a datacentre partnership with Orange – has secured a seven-week exclusivity agreement to finalise a proposal, the report claims, citing people involved in the negotiations. Singtel has confirmed that talks “with interested parties” are underway but did not confirm the names of those parties.

Telecom Italia (TIM) has posted steady quarterly results ahead of its takeover by Post Italiane. TIM saw group revenues grow by 2% to €6.8bn in the first six months of 2026, primarily driven by its Brazilian operation, while domestic numbers at the Italian incumbent remained flat. Across the group, the Italian telco posted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of €1.8bn, up 1.2% year on year, but again TIM Brasil saw a greater increase, with EBTIDA of €0.9bn, up 5.5% on the previous year. However, in posting its results, TIM was keen to stress the impact of losing major mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) customer Coop Voce last year, which saw 2.3 million MVNO customers move over to Fastweb + Vodafone. Excluding the MVNO impact, TIM reported a domestic revenue rise of 2%. TIM’s Enterprise division is driving growth, with revenues up 5.6% to €1.7bn, with the second quarter experiencing a more rapid increase than the first. The telco credited its cloud segment as the biggest growth contributor, with revenues up 18.1%. This comes as the operator prepares to enter a new phase, after its board of directors earlier this month approved a takeover offer from Post Italiane. “In the second quarter, we recorded a clear acceleration in profitability and a return to growth in our domestic operations, gradually overcoming the temporary effects that had characterized the start of the year,” said TIM CEO Pietro Labriola.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the speed, scale and sophistication of mobile attacks, with the number of phishing events on mobile devices up more than 380% since January 2025, according to a new report. A study from Zimperium Research found the number of devices on which employees clicked malicious links grew 110% in 2025 compared to the previous year, and that AI-assisted malware is driving the growth of fraud. Zimperium’s 2026 Global Mobile Threat Report, which is based on figures from the US firm’s zLabs research team, found that mobile security remains an afterthought for many organisations, leaving enterprises vulnerable to AI-enabled attacks. The report also found that AI is used to generate content estimated to be 4.5 times more convincing than anything written by humans and that almost 86% of phishing attacks now contain AI-generated elements. Spyware is another issue, present in nearly one in 10 mobile devices, up fourfold year on year. “AI has changed the game on securing mobile. It’s making mobile attacks easier, scalable and much more sophisticated. It’s forcing organisations to rethink how they ensure, trust and guard against fraud on the devices and mobile apps that their employees and customers rely on every day,” said Shridhar Mittal, CEO of Zimperium.

New research from DE-CIX (see chart, above) found that despite 96% of respondents claiming their enterprise networks are ready for future cloud and AI initiatives, the average IT team still spends more than 11 hours each week resolving cloud connectivity problems. According to figures from the German internet exchange, the most anticipated cloud connectivity challenge is latency between cloud environments with some 28% of enterprises in the US and UK expecting to face such problems. Security vulnerabilities (expected by 27% of US and UK enterprises) and downtime (26%) round out the top three, while the cost of connectivity (24%) and data sovereignty (23%) were also identified as issues in the research carried out by Censuswide on behalf of DE-CIX. The data shows that many businesses are now turning to private interconnection, as they seek lower latency, greater resilience, enhanced security and more predictable performance. Some 61% of companies are already using private connectivity to clouds, while another 31% are actively considering it. However, it is larger enterprises (with more than 1,000 employees that are mostly embracing private cloud connectivity, with 71% adopting the technology, compared with just 31% of medium-sized enterprises (with 100 to 249 employees). One in 10 smaller companies spend between 21 and 40 hours each week dealing with connectivity problems, DE-CIX found. The full study can be found here.

– The staff, TelecomTV