What’s up with… Airtel Money, Pantheon AI, Orange

• London IPO looms for Airtel Money
• Pantheon AI to build €12bn facility in Croatia 
• Orange takes more fibre assets under its control

In today’s industry news roundup: Airtel Africa is hoping to raise up to $2bn from an IPO of its mobile money operation; US money is to fund a massive AI datacentre build in Croatia; Orange has secured €1.3bn in funding to take control of additional fibre broadband assets; and much more!

Airtel Africa is set to launch an initial public offering (IPO) for Airtel Money, its mobile money business, with hopes of raising between $1.5bn and $2bn from the sale of a minority stake in the company, according to several reports. The UK-headquartered company, which is majority owned by Indian telco Bharti Airtel, has identified London as the most likely location to list Airtel Money, according to Bloomberg (subscription required), which cited sources familiar with the matter. The news service has previously reported that Airtel was considering listing the unit, which provides mobile money services including a mobile wallet, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The listing could value Airtel Money at as much as $10bn. Though Bharti Enterprises remains the current majority owner, it has previously sold an undisclosed minority stake to San Francisco-based private equity firm TPG Capital, at a contract price of $200m: It also sold an additional share to Mastercard in April 2021 for $100m. Airtel has been considering listing the money unit for a while, with Airtel Africa’s CEO Sunil Taldar saying he expected the IPO to take place by the middle of 2026. In fact, as far back as 2024, TelecomTV noted Bloomberg reports that claimed an IPO was on the cards for Airtel Africa’s mobile money arm that would have valued the company at around $4bn. Airtel Africa is working with Citigroup for the potential London listing, according to reports from the Times of India. It comes just months after Bharti Airtel injected $2.2bn in cash in Airtel Money in India, as part of an effort to compete with Jio Financial Services in India’s large and growing digital lending sector.

With talk of an AI bubble, you might think that the era of eye-watering infrastructure investment numbers might be over… but think again. Pantheon Atlas, an investment ‘vehicle’ representing a group of institutional investors and “high-net-worth individuals”, has announced a plan to develop Pantheon AI, a “hyperscale AI datacentre and innovation campus”, in Topusko, Croatia, and has slapped a €50bn figure on the project. A quick inspection of the details shows that this isn’t the figure that Pantheon Atlas is stumping up, though the projected cost of building the campus (with work to begin early next year) is set to be a €12bn, so we’re still talking very big numbers: The €50bn number is the “total investment” expected to go into the campus once “tenants deploy equipment and technology at scale”. The 310-acre campus, which is being built to “accommodate Nvidia GW scale AI factory standards”, is set to have 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity, four independent fibre transport connections that link up to “three major” European data network routes (with a GreenMed subsea cable to add a link to Milan by 2028), and be powered by renewable energy delivered by an on-site 500 megawatt (MW) solar plant and 8,000 MWh (megawatt hours) of battery storage. According to Pantheon Atlas, the facility “solves a structural capacity gap in Europe – where surging AI-driven demand for datacentre capacity has outpaced available power, land and construction resources – delivering the highest levels of availability (above Tier IV), a one-of-a-kind standard in Europe. The transatlantic partnership developing the campus combines American capital and investment expertise with extensive technical knowledge, local relationships, regulatory groundwork and significant and unique grid access built over years of work in Croatia.”  

Orange has secured €1.3bn in financing from CaixaBank and BNP Paribas for the acquisition of Scorefit, currently a fully owned subsidiary of BNP Paribas. Scorefit holds fibre access network assets bought on France’s wholesale market specifically for Orange, so the acquisition of the company will give Orange full control over those broadband infrastructure assets. The acquisition is expected to conclude in the third quarter of this year, subject to approvals from all the relevant authorities, with the deal helping Orange to simplify its financial structure as part of its move from copper to fibre networks. The financing agreements will last five years.

Typical seed funding rounds are normally in the range of $1m to $5m, so when a company that is only months old raises $1.1bn for its seed fund, for a valuation of $5.1bn, we know we’re in AI territory. London, UK-based Ineffable Intelligence (check out its website’s 1970s vibe), which is headed up by David Silver, a University College London professor and a former team leader at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, is exciting investors by focusing on the development of a ‘superlearner’, an AI tool that “discovers all knowledge from its own experience… without relying on human data”. The funding round was led by major tech investors Sequoia Capital (see its blog here) and Lightspeed (see more here), while Nvidia, Google, private equity firm DST Global and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund also chipped in (for more on the latter’s involvement, see this UK government announcement).  

O2 Daisy, the joint venture formed last year by the merger of VMO2 Business – Virgin Media O2 (VMO2)’s enterprise unit – with the B2B services arm of the Daisy Group, has rebranded as O2 Business. According to the company, which is 70% owned by VMO2 and 30% by Daisy Group and which boasts “hundreds of thousands of customers across the UK, ranging from large enterprises to small and medium sized organisations”, the name change will help “UK organisations cut through complexity – making it simpler to connect, communicate and get things done.” To make its point, the newly named O2 Business revealed the results of new research that suggests an increasing number of businesses are facing a “complexity trap” and that technology decisions are at the heart of many associated challenges.   

Millicom has taken full control of Colombia Telecomunicaciones (Coltel) after acquiring the remaining 32.5% stake in the telco from the Colombian government for an undisclosed sum. Earlier this year, the Latin American operator acquired Telefónica’s controlling stake in the Colombian operator in a deal worth $214m (significantly less than the $400m that had initially been agreed in July 2024). Taking full control paves the way for Millicom to merge Coltel, which operates as Movistar, with its existing Colombian operation, TigoUne. Millicom has been expanding its reach in Latin America through several purchases – notably from Telefónica, which has been offloading multiple Latin American businesses in order to reduce its debt exposure, with Millicom also buying Telefónica Ecuador (known as Otecel) and the Spanish telco’s Uruguayan business in separate deals last year.  

A subsidiary of Vodafone Qatar has completed the acquisition of subscription-based cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool Maktapp, according to a filing with the Qatar Stock Exchange. Infinity Fintech Ventures – which is part of  Vodafone Qatar – did not disclose the financial details of the deal, but said the step comes as part of the further development of its digital strategy. Doha-based Maktapp helps enterprises and business customers bill their own customers, get paid and manage finances on a single digital platform. Its platform includes multiple business functions, including ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and a CMS (content management system).

– The staff, TelecomTV