What’s up with… LG Uplus & Ericsson, World Cup data, Telefónica

• LG Uplus and Ericsson team up on AI-native R&D
• Verizon and AT&T share World Cup data stats
• Telefónica seeks buyer for its subsea operation

In today’s industry news roundup: Ericsson and South Korea’s LG Uplus are to collaborate on voice AI and AI-native network R&D; Verizon and AT&T had their hands, and networks, full during the World Cup; Telefónica is having another go at selling its international subsea networks unit; and much more!

South Korean operator LG Uplus has reportedly signed a strategic partnership with Ericsson that will see the partners develop network-based voice AI services and design AI-native autonomous network systems. The bedrock of the partnership will be the integration of data held by the South Korean firm’s AI call agent, ixi-O, and Ericsson’s network platforms, with the combination expected to result in the development of multiple services that function at the network (rather than device or app) level. According to Business Korea, the services will include autonomous spam call management and the automatic onboarding of next-generation devices, including AI glasses and physical AI (such as humanoid robots). Hong Bum-sik, CEO of LG Uplus, stated: “By combining LG Uplus’ voice AI expertise, accumulated through ixi-O with Ericsson’s global network technologies, we aim to introduce intelligent network-based voice AI services to customers around the world. This partnership will accelerate our global voice AI business while enabling AI-native network technologies to enhance customer experiences and support our long-term growth.”

Verizon, which was the official telco partner for the recently concluded FIFA World Cup 2026, says its network carried almost 500 Tbytes of data across stadia hosting the tournament’s matches. The operator’s president of global networks and technology, Joe Russo – who is retiring soon and is set to be succeeded by Deutsche Telekom’s former tech lead Abdu Mudesir – noted in this LinkedIn announcement that this is the “equivalent of streaming HD video for more than 30 years!” During Sunday’s World Cup final, which featured more than 120 minutes of ‘robust’ Spain vs Argentina action and far too many minutes of so-called ‘entertainment’ just prior to the kick-off and at half time, Verizon’s network carried a total of 29.2 Tbytes of data, “with uplink volume surging nearly 70% during the halftime show,” according to Russo. 

Still on the topic… AT&T has shared some interesting data usage statistics from World Cup games that were hosted at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, in the past month. The game between Australia and Egypt drove the highest data usage – 28.7 Tbytes – of the nine World Cup games hosted at the stadium. “To put that into perspective, that’s equivalent to sharing more than 5.7 million social media posts,” noted AT&T in this press release. The same stadium was also the location for a recent demonstration by AT&T and Ericsson of drone detection using advanced network sensing over a 5G network.

Telefónica is reportedly trying to sell Telxius, its submarine network and edge datacentre unit, according to a report from Spanish newspaper El Confidencial. Telefónica, which owns a 70% stake in Telxius, and investment firm Pontegadea, which owns the other 30%, have hired banks to find potential buyers willing to pay €1.2bn for the business, which manages more than 100,000km of subsea and terrestrial backhaul optical cables. The Telxius owners had previously tried to sell the business about five years ago but couldn’t find a buyer. The move comes as Telefónica focuses its efforts on its core markets of Spain, Germany, Brazil and the UK as part of its Transform & Grow strategy unveiled late last year: It has already struck a number of deals to offload unwanted operations in Latin America.     

Microsoft and French AI developer Mistral have announced a “significant expansion of their strategic partnership to help enterprises and regulated industries adopt frontier AI with greater choice, control and operational consistency.” The companies are bringing Mistral’s frontier and efficient models across the Microsoft platform, including Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio and Azure, “so customers can build and run AI across a spectrum of operating environments, from cloud-scale deployments to customer-controlled and fully disconnected operations.” The move will strengthen Microsoft’s position as one of the key underlying cloud platforms underpinning sovereign digital services efforts in Europe. “Across Europe and other regulated markets, organisations want access to frontier AI while maintaining control over their data, operations and critical workloads,” noted the partners. “This partnership extends Microsoft’s sovereign cloud approach by combining Mistral’s frontier models with Microsoft’s security, compliance and cloud-to-edge platform, giving customers greater choice in how and where they deploy AI.” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch added: “Our mission has always been to put frontier AI in the hands of every organisation while keeping them in control of their technology. With Microsoft as our partner, our models reach enterprises and public institutions at global scale – delivered through a platform trusted for the most demanding, regulated workloads and available everywhere our customers operate.”

In the meantime, here’s something that all types of companies (including telcos) offering AI to their customers will need to heed: The European Commission has published guidelines to help any “providers and deployers” of AI systems meet the transparency obligations that are part of the EC’s AI Act. Those transparency obligations, which come into force on 2 August, “will help people recognise when they are interacting with AI or when content has been generated or altered by AI, reducing the risk of deception and manipulation. The guidelines, published today, clarify which providers and deployers must comply with the transparency obligations for interactive AI systems and the marking and labelling of AI-generated content.” That should keep the legal profession busy for… ever! 

CuspAI, a Cambridge, UK-based startup founded in 2024 that is developing an AI system for materials discovery, has raised $450m in its Series B round of funding that was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, it announced in this blog. The round values Cusp at $2.6bn, will help it “move faster still across the US, APAC and Europe” and takes the total it has raised to date to $650m. The company also launched the AI Materials Foundry, which it describes as “a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for the design of new materials, orchestrated by a single agentic platform.” The aim of the collaborative effort is to seek an end to “the materials bottleneck constraining progress. Semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing are among the industries facing the same challenge: While the engineering needed for innovation is well understood, the constraint is materials,” noted CuspAI. Among the 45-plus founding members of the foundry are Nvidia, which will provide the compute infrastructure, and Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Team, which is developing the Universal Model for Atoms (UMA), “a frontier atomistic chemistry model for materials science,” noted the startup. CuspAI’s proprietary AI platform, MIRA, “sits at the heart of the network, enabling partners to run full discovery cycles – from generative materials design through [to] simulation, synthesis route planning and coordinated experimental validation. The platform is underpinned by the largest curated experimental materials datasets in the world,” the company added. 

Concerns about the environmental impact of new datacentre construction plans continue to come thick and fast. According to a written submission from industry pressure group Water UK to a government enquiry, the UK does not have enough water to support the UK’s ambitions for datacentre facility expansion, reports The Guardian. The trade body’s submission notes that the infrastructure expansion plans, which will require water for cooling, are “fatally flawed” as the UK government’s water forecasts “explicitly exclude” any usage by datacentres. Water isn’t the only resource of concern when it comes to datacentre rollouts: The Republic of Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) recently published a report showing that the percentage share of total metered electricity consumption used by datacentres in the country reached 23% in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, while that number is expected to reach 30% by 2030; and in the US, the state of New York has barred the construction of any new hyperscale datacentres (50 megawatts or more of power consumption) for one year due to concerns about electricity bills, water usage and air quality.

1Global, the Amsterdam-based eSIM platform operator that is supporting the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) launches of fintech firms, such as Revolut, and retail companies, such as Lidl, doubled its annual revenues in 2025 to about $200m and increased its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) by 130% to $26m, reports Telecompaper (subscription required), citing 1Global’s annual report filing. In June, 1Global helped Revolut to launch mobile services in the Netherlands, enabling the digital bank to offer customers a 20 GBytes monthly mobile data package for just €9.99. Revolut had already launched mobile services in the UK and Poland in partnership with the eSIM platform company. Earlier this year Schwarz Group, Lidl’s parent company and an increasingly influential presence in Europe’s digital services and infrastructure sectors, invested about $80m to take a 9.9% stake in 1Global.  

German IT tech and services firm Bechtle has teamed up with Nvidia and Dell Technologies to provide European enterprises with the technology and support services (design, deployment) they need to build their own AI factory. “The goal is to support customers with validated reference architectures, enabling them to bring AI into productive use faster and to transform promising use cases into robust and economically efficient operating models,” noted the company in this announcement. “A key advantage is data sovereignty, as the solutions can be operated entirely on-premises,” with data stored in the customer’s own datacentre, it added. The partners are to open a Dell AI Factory in Nuremberg that will “include a demo and proof-of-concept environment as well as a competence centre for consulting and workshops,” noted Bechtle. 

– The staff, TelecomTV