What’s up with… Hans Vestberg, open AI infra, Nebius & Nvidia

• What Hans Vestberg did next
• Tech giants team up on open spec for AI infrastructure
• Nvidia pumps $2bn into AI factory operator Nebius

In today’s industry news roundup: Former Verizon and Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg joins a boutique advisory firm that used to provide strategic guidance to… Verizon; major tech firms, including Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, form a new industry group to push for open specification and ecosystem for AI infrastructure; Nvidia adds to its recent investments in AI and optical specialists with a $2bn cash injection for European AI infrastructure and cloud services player Nebius; and more!

New York City-based boutique advisory firm Consello, which “counsels CEOs and boards on the most business-critical and growth-defining issues facing their organisations, from operational transformation and capital allocation to AI-driven disruption and long-term strategic positioning,” has hired former Verizon and Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg as a senior operating advisor. After seven years at the helm of the US telco, Vestberg was unexpectedly and unceremoniously replaced as CEO of Verizon in October 2025, with Dan Schulman taking the helm at the network operator. “Hans is one of the most accomplished leaders in the global telecommunications industry, having led two of the world’s most consequential companies through periods of rapid technological evolution and global expansion,” noted Consello founder, chairman and CEO Declan Kelly in this announcement. “Part of what differentiates Consello is that our advisors are former operators and C-suite leaders who have sat in the same seats as the CEOs and boards we counsel today. Hans’s perspective and experience will be enormously valuable to our clients, and we are delighted to welcome him to the firm.” Vestberg, for his part, noted: “I’ve spent my career scaling innovation and building businesses designed for long-term growth. I have a lived experience with Consello, having been a client of the firm when I led Verizon and saw firsthand the unique contribution the company makes to C-suite advisory and decision-making. Consello provides me with the right platform to leverage my own experience to date to the best leaders in the world. This is not advice from the sidelines; it is counsel shaped by leaders who have faced the same pressures and tradeoffs that leaders confront every day. I’m excited to join a team singularly focused on helping today’s CEOs sharpen their advantage and build businesses that are relevant and resilient.”

Six major AI technology sector players – AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI – have joined forces to form a new industry group that aims to make it easier to connect multiple GPUs (graphic processing units) in a unified computing system, but they’ve failed to come up with a catchy name. According to the founders, the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group “marks a pivotal shift toward a hyperscaler-driven open ecosystem to enable the development of a multi-vendor supply chain for optical scale-up interconnects” (which make multiple GPUs behave as one giant GPU). “By aligning on an open specification, the OCI MSA members are promoting a robust optical ecosystem, which will ensure that the future of AI interconnects is built with a flexible, multi-vendor foundation to meet the optical interconnect needs of modern AI infrastructure,” the group announced. The aims and challenges of the companies will be familiar to many in the telecom sector that have grappled with proprietary ‘black box’ systems since communications networks were invented. According to the group’s website, the main objectives are to: “Establish the open, interoperable specification for AI scale-up” by defining a “unified optical architecture that breaks the constraints of proprietary interconnects, ensuring seamless cross-vendor compatibility for hyperscale AI clusters”; “overcome the physical limits of copper interconnects” by providing “clear, unified architectural guidance to transition the industry to low-power optical SerDes [serializer/deserializer], delivering the latency, bandwidth and energy efficiency required for next-generation AI; and “secure a scalable, multi-vendor AI supply chain” by uniting “hyperscale end-users and leading silicon innovators to reduce integration risk, accelerate development cycles, and ensure long-term, scalable deployments without vendor lock-in.”

Cash-rich Nvidia, which recently reported full fiscal year revenues of $216bn and net profit of $117bn (up by 65% on both counts), has opened its wallet again to invest $2bn in Amsterdam-based Nebius, which builds and runs AI infrastructure and offers a range of AI cloud services to enterprise users. Nebius, which operates its own datacentre in Finland and has colocated facilities in the US, Iceland, the UK and France, noted that the investment is part of a strategic partnership that builds on its existing deployment of Nvidia technology “across its global platform, including multiple gigawatt-scale AI factories in the US. To enable Nebius to deploy more than 5 GW (gigawatts) of capacity by the end of 2030, Nvidia will support Nebius’s early adoption of the latest generation of Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform.” The move follows Nvidia’s recent investments (also of $2bn each) in optical component vendors Coherent and Lumentum, and its $30bn investment in OpenAI.    

Cécile Coune is set to become the new chair of the board at state-owned Proximus following the Belgian operator’s annual shareholders’ meeting on 15 April, the current chair Stefaan De Clerck told Belgium’s Public Enterprises Committee of the Chamber of Representatives on 11 March, reports Le Soir. Coune has been a Proximus board member since 2023 and is well known and regarded for her senior executive and board roles at a number of financial, insurance and legal institutions. She will succeed De Clerck, who has been chair since 2013: He was due to step down in 2025 but his term was extended by a year to help steer Proximus through a challenging period that included the sudden departure of its former CEO, Guillaume Boutin (who joined Vodafone Group as its head of investments and strategy in May 2025), political pressure over its strategy and financial performance and uncertainty over its international ambitions. Stijn Bijnens took on the role of CEO in September last year and recently presented the operator’s new dual strategy, dubbed Amplify for the domestic business and Elevate for Proximus Global (the international operations), as well as the operator’s 2025 financial results. Bijnens is projecting earnings and revenue growth over the next few years, with cashflow to be boosted by lower capital expenditure investments, as Proximus is coming to the end of its domestic fibre broadband network deployments.  

South Korean operator LG Uplus has teamed up with Fortinet to develop services such as secure access service edge (SASE), which integrates connectivity with cybersecurity functionality, for enterprise customers. The partners plan to co-develop solutions “that reliably enforce consistent security policies based on the latest global security technologies and establish a zero trust-based system that continuously verifies all access attempts,” noted LG Uplus in this announcement (in Korean). The news comes only a few days after Fortinet unveiled new enhancements to its security operations (SecOps) platform and a month after it reported a 14% increase in full year revenues to $6.8bn.    

– The staff, TelecomTV