• DT teams up for EC-backed AI gigafactory bid 
• AWS launches multicloud connectivity services with Google
• UK altnet Brsk suffers data breach

In today’s industry news roundup: Deutsche Telekom is reportedly getting close to an AI gigafactory funding bid along with partner Schwarz Group; new AWS offering promises easier connectivity between the hyperscalers; UK altnet suffers damaging hack; and more!

In partnership with giant German retailer Schwarz Group, Deutsche Telekom is reportedly on the verge of submitting a joint bid for European Commission (EC) funds to build an AI gigafactory that would contribute towards the region’s digital sovereignty efforts, according to German media outlet Handelsblatt. In April this year, the EC set out its AI Continent Action Plan, which includes the development of five large-scale AI gigafactories that will benefit from €20bn of EC funding through the commission’s InvestAI programme, alongside private investments. Then in May, reports emerged that DT and Schwarz Group, along with web-hosting firm Ionos and German software giant SAP, were forming an AI gigafactory consortium to tap into the EC’s funding pot. Now, according to Handelsblatt, DT and Schwarz are leading the charge and are in talks with Canadian infrastructure investor Brookfield to be a provider of private sector funds for the construction of an AI gigafactory in Germany. Schwarz is well known for its retail operations, including the international Lidl supermarket chain, but it also has a digital services operation called Schwarz Digits, which, according to the company, “guarantees the highest possible degree of digital sovereignty”. According to the Handelsblatt report, Schwarz Digits CEO Rolf Schumann stated during the recent summit for European digital sovereignty in Berlin, with DT’s CEO Tim Höttges only a few metres away, that his company had teamed up with DT on plans for a gigafactory. DT is already moving ahead with its plans for a separate major AI factory deployment: In early November, DT and Nvidia jointly unveiled what they described as “the world’s first industrial AI cloud – a €1bn partnership”. That collaboration includes the construction of an ‘AI factory’ at an existing datacentre in Munich, where 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs are being installed to build what DT described as a “Deutschland stack” that will go live from January 2026. 

Expect a lot of updates from hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week as it hosts its annual AWS re:Invent gathering in Las Vegas. Among its early announcements is the launch of ‘AWS Interconnect – multicloud’, which provides AWS customers with “simple, resilient, high-speed private connections to other cloud service providers (CSPs),” starting with Google Cloud and to be followed by Microsoft Azure later in 2026. AWS notes that customers adopting a multicloud strategy have, when setting up their connectivity between different hyperscaler facilities, had to “go the route of a ‘do-it-yourself’ multicloud approach, leading to complexities of managing global multi-layered networks at scale”. It claims AWS Interconnect – multicloud is “the first purpose-built product of its kind and a new way of how clouds connect and talk to each other” and “makes it easy to connect AWS networking services, such as AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Cloud WAN and Amazon VPC, to other cloud service providers (CSPs) quickly, instead of weeks or months”. This is good news for customers – if it’s as simple as AWS says and is cost-effective – and not so good news for the telcos that want to provide that multicloud connectivity to the enterprise community themselves. 

In what is becoming an all too depressing trend, UK fibre broadband operator Brsk, which is now part of major altnet Netomnia following last year’s merger, has suffered a major data breach that has resulted in information related to more than 235,000 customers being put up for sale by cybercriminals, reports ISPreview. The news will be a setback for Netomnia, which is currently believed to be the subject of M&A interest from Virgin Media O2 and CityFibre.  

– The staff, TelecomTV