• Intel mulls stake sale to Trump administration 
• Colt tackles ‘cyber incident’ 
• UK datacentre growth sparks resource fears

In today’s industry news roundup: Could the Trump administration take a stake in Intel?; Colt has had to shut down some internal systems following a cyber incident; the number of datacentres in the UK is set to top 570 by 2030, sparking fears that power supplies will be stretched beyond their limits; and much more!

The ongoing ‘guess what’s next’ Intel/Donald Trump relationship story has taken another twist. A week ago, the US president was calling for Intel’s CEO Lip-bu Tan to quit, then a few days ago the two met at The White House, relations thawed, and further discussions between the chip giant’s executives and the US administration were being planned. Now, according to Bloomberg (as reported by the BBC), President Trump’s administration is in talks to take a stake in the beleaguered semiconductor firm. The investment would reportedly be linked to Intel’s plans to build a manufacturing hub in Ohio, though no details of the size of the investment, or what kind of stake the US government might hold in the vendor, have been reported. There has been no confirmation from The White House or Intel that investment discussions have taken place, but analysts are already suggesting that such an investment would make sense for the US government, which would rather have a strong Intel that can boost the US chip manufacturing sector rather than watching it whither in the face of intense competition from Asia (including, potentially, China). The speculation that the US government might invest in Intel has been enough to light a fire under the chip firm’s share price, which has risen by almost 11% in early Friday trading to $24.89. The news comes only weeks after Intel unveiled plans to spin off “key elements” of its Network and Edge Group (NEX), the part of the chip giant that is most relevant to the telecom sector, into a separate business as part of the company’s ongoing restructuring process under Tan, who took the helm in March. That news emerged as Intel reported second-quarter revenues of $12.9bn, better than expected, and an operating loss of almost $3.2bn.

Colt is the latest network operator to battle hackers as it deals with a “cyber incident” that has been affecting its internal systems for the past few days. Initially, the operator updated customers on interruptions to various services, citing a “technical issue”, but on Thursday it posted an update in its status thread that noted: “Thank you for your patience and understanding while some of your support services including Colt Online and our Voice API platform remain unavailable. We can confirm that this is related to our response to a recent cyber incident at Colt Technology Services.  We detected the cyber incident on an internal system. This system is separate from our customers’ infrastructure. We took immediate protective measures to ensure the security of our customers, colleagues, and business, and we proactively notified the relevant authorities. One of our protective measures involved us proactively taking some systems offline, which has led to the disruption of some of the support services we provide to our customers. Our technical team is focused on restoring the affected systems and is working closely with third-party cyber experts.” The operator was still battling with the aftermath of the breach on Friday morning, when it reported: “We continue to work around the clock to restore impacted internal systems following a cyber incident earlier this week. We appreciate it’s frustrating not being able to use some systems currently, including Colt Online and our Voice API platform, and we’re grateful for your understanding.” The Register, which first reported the incident, has further details and insights from experts on the nature of the breach.  

The number of datacentres in the UK is to increase by close to 20% over the next five years, reports the BBC. Given that there are an astonishing 477 of them across the UK, it means that by 2030 the total will be over 570, according to data collected by construction research firm Barbour ABI (which has identified 95 new projects due to begin in the next 12 months) and concerns about their proliferation are growing. Datacentres require massive amounts of electricity and use unconscionable quantities of water to ensure their server racks stay cool enough to function. Analysts are now worried that the burgeoning datacentre sector will put so much pressure on the national electricity grid that domestic consumers could soon face power cuts so that datacentres may continue to operate – and that would have severe and untold political consequences. The BBC reports that more than half of the new datacentres will be built in and around London and in its surrounding counties. Elsewhere, nine will be built in Wales, one in Scotland, and five in Greater Manchester. The biggest of the lot will be the last to be built at the end of the current construction wave – a £10bn AI datacentre at Blyth, north of Newcastle upon Tyne on England’s north-east coast. It will be gargantuan – 10 massive buildings covering an area of 540,000 square metres. That’s bigger than several big new shopping centres. The power and water it will consume will be mind boggling. Many datacentres are funded by US big tech companies, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but the proposed new Blyth development will be the property of the US private investment outfit, the Blackstone Group. It is UK government policy to encourage the positioning and building of datacentres across the UK, as the facilities have been designated as ‘critical national infrastructure’. However, ordinary citizens are increasingly concerned that datacentre proliferation will result in more expensive energy bills for them – not least because prospective builders are not required to include estimated power consumption in their planning applications. Furthermore, the reporting of water consumption is voluntary and rarely revealed. Strange, that! People are also worried that the day will soon dawn when they will turn on their taps only to find they run dry as household water is diverted to meet the insatiable needs of AI datacentres. 

The East African country of Uganda is pushing to build a digital society and economy based on the availability of abundant bandwidth but progress is slow, particularly in the many wide swathes of remote settlements and under-served areas that still do not have sufficient electricity even to power wireless communications systems. The severity of the ongoing problem was discussed at the recent ‘Telecom Sector Power Forum 2025, Powering the Telecom Sector to Drive Socio-Economic Transformation’ event held in the national capital, Kampala. As reported in Uganda’s daily English-language news site, The Independent, the forum brought together senior executives from Uganda’s energy, ICT, telecoms and policy sectors to discuss how to design and implement the integrated infrastructure necessary to drive national development. The Minister for ICT and National Guidance, Chris Baryomunsi, stressed that “stable and inclusive power access is a non-negotiable foundation for a thriving ICT sector.” And there’s the rub. Uganda does not have a co-ordinated telecom power/energy strategy. Development is piecemeal, sporadic, frequently haphazard and sometimes left uncompleted. There is almost no alignment between the country’s national electrification plans and its digitisation ambitions and goals. Overall, national electricity access in Uganda stands at about 51% of the population, which, according to the latest census, was 50.2 million in 2024. Most Ugandans live in, or adjacent to, cities. Meanwhile, rural electrification is available to only about 31% of the population (when and if it works). Power outages are commonplace. The forum agreed that without properly targeted power provision to telecom installations in rural areas, the digital divide in Uganda will never be bridged. Closing the gathering, minister Baryomunsi announced the introduction of three key directives to establish a co-ordinated framework for telecom energy via shared planning and closer co-operation between the telecoms and energy sectors. Good luck!

Agentic AIs are artificial intelligence systems able to operate autonomously: They are set to achieve specific goals, make decisions and take actions either with limited or no direct human supervision as they can plan, adapt and learn from their environment to meet the objectives that may be defined by a human or by the AI itself. Agentic AI is increasingly being applied to replace humans in the workplace, particularly in contact centres. However, a new report from London, UK-headquartered Sabio Group, which describes itself as a “global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist”, is rather more upbeat on the potential redundancy front. The company has it that while agentic AI will indeed transform contact centres, its ultimate impact is yet to be determined and will not necessarily result in large numbers of lay-offs amongst contact centre staff. According to Kevin McGachy, head of AI solutions at Sabio Group, less than 50% of contact centre senior management regard headcount reduction as a primary objective of applying agentic AI, instead claiming that the technology will act to “reduce” the friction that can occur when human agents have to switch between several systems when trying to serve a single customer. Complexity, delays and inconsistency can result from the use of multiple systems, but agentic AI can, apparently, perform all those tasks without making mistakes or causing delays in data processing. McGachy stresses that these are not “abstract benefits” but correlate directly “to measurable CX and operational improvements” resulting in “higher customer satisfaction, better first contact resolution, reduced handling time and improved digital containment rates.” Thus a good operating model will have agentic AI doing what it does best, while humans will “add the most value: empathy, judgement, and complex exception handling.” Obviously a golden age for contact centres is about to dawn – or not. We’ll see.

The Frankfurt, Germany-based International Federation of Robotics (IFR) has published a ‘Position Paper’ with the title Humanoid Robots: “Vision and Reality”. Humanoids are now considered to be the next major step change in robotics as development continues apace across the planet: For example, China, already the world’s biggest market for industrial robots, has set specific targets for the mass-production of humanoids. Meanwhile, in the US and Europe, big tech companies are ramping up investments to develop “general-purpose robots based on human motion mechanics”. Takayuki Ito, the president of the IFR, stated: “Since our environment is optimised for the human body, the idea of a quick, universal helper to maintain manufacturing and services is evident. If, and when, a mass adoption of humanoids will take place remains uncertain [and] in any case, humanoids are not expected to replace the types of robots currently on the market in the future. Instead, they will complement and expand upon existing technology.” In the US, the likes of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla, among many others, are devoting massive resources to AI and robotics technologies. Elsewhere, military funding is on the increase and many startup robotics companies are enjoying an influx of new money for the development of humanoids. Expectations are rising that, in due course, humanoids will be commonplace in the logistics and manufacturing sector where they will be used to enhance productivity and efficiency. In much of the west, the notion that such robots might be developed and marketed as social companions and assistants to real human beings remains on the back-burner – for now at least. However, Japan has been developing successive generations of ‘social robot’ humanoids since at least 2020. Variants are now operational in hospitals, care facilities for the elderly and in educational environments. Then there’s China, where humanoids are central to the nationally imposed strategy of initially using humanoids in sectors such as customer service, the automation of manufacturing  production lines and, later, “to reduce reliance on human labour”. As the sage of MAD magazine, Alfred E Neumann, says – What, Me Worry?

Scientists at Yonsei University in South Korea have, for the first time, directly measured quantum metric tensor in real material rather than via a theoretical construct and artificial systems. Using black phosphorus (also known as phosphorene), a layered semiconductor material with a two-dimensional structure, the researchers successfully directly measured the quantum metric, which is a key measure of the quantum distance in solid-state materials. Quantum distance refers to a measure of quantum mechanical similarity between two quantum states. A quantum distance of one means that the two quantum states are the same, whereas a quantum distance of zero implies that they are exactly the opposite. The concept has been around in theoretical physics for many years but its potential as a practical application in quantum computing and ’traditional’ supercomputing is very new. The experiment provides an insight of the hitherto hidden geometry of electrons and could lead to a breakthrough in the development of even more advanced superconductors, next-generation semiconductors and fault-tolerant quantum computing technologies. The head of the international research team at Yonsei University, Professor Keun Su Kim, announced the development, the details of which have been published in the academic journal ‘Science’. He commented, “Measuring the quantum distance is fundamentally important not only to understand anomalous quantum phenomena in solids, including special ones such as superconductors, but also to advance our quantum science and technologies. As an example, a precise measure of quantum distances would help develop fault-tolerant quantum computation technologies.” Overall, the work is expected to provide insights into quantum geometric responses in a wide class of crystalline systems and eventually pave the way for a quantum technology-led future. 

– The staff, TelecomTV