What’s up with… Intel & Nvidia, Telus & Samsung, Netskope

• Nvidia invests $5bn in Intel, plots joint R&D
• Telus rolls with Samsung’s RIC
• Netskope debuts on the Nasdaq

In today’s industry news roundup: Intel’s stock rises more than 20% as it’s forced to accept financial and R&D support from fierce rival Nvidia; Canadian telco Telus has added Samsung RAN intelligent controller (RIC) to its Open RAN rollout; Netskope raises more than $900m from its IPO; and more!

Could Nvidia be Intel’s saviour? The AI chip giant is buying $5bn of its traditional rival’s stock at a purchase price of $23.28 per share and is to collaborate with Intel on the development of “multiple generations of custom datacentre and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets,” the companies announced on Thursday. “For datacentres, Intel will build Nvidia-custom x86 CPUs that Nvidia will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market,” they added. The news comes only weeks after SoftBank Group invested $2bn in Intel and the US government invested $8.9bn in the beleaguered chip firm. “AI is powering a new industrial revolution and reinventing every layer of the computing stack, from silicon to systems to software. At the heart of this reinvention is Nvidia’s CUDA architecture,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Nvidia describes CUDA as a “parallel computing platform and programming model developed for general computing on graphical processing units (GPUs)”. Huang continued: “This historic collaboration tightly couples Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem – a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.” Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan added: “Intel’s x86 architecture has been foundational to modern computing for decades and we are innovating across our portfolio to enable the workloads of the future. Intel’s leading datacentre and client computing platforms, combined with our process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, will complement Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry. We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the Nvidia team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business.” The news sent Intel’s share price up by a staggering 24.6% to $31.02. 

Canadian telco Telus is to add to its existing Samsung Open RAN technology rollout with the deployment of the South Korean vendor’s RAN intelligent controller (RIC). “Samsung will provide its RIC solution, including open multivendor support and a rich suite of applications as part of Samsung CognitiV Network Operations Suite (NOS), to further enable intelligent automation, enhanced energy efficiency and optimised performance across Telus’s wireless network,” the vendor noted in this announcement. The RIC deployment will “enable Telus to harness AI throughout network operations and management – significantly boosting operational efficiency with potential to reduce costs,” the vendor added. Bernard Bureau, VP of wireless strategy and services at Telus, stated: “We are excited to broaden our collaboration with Samsung to transform our network and enhance the customer experience using AI. This partnership aligns closely with our commitment to responsible sovereign AI development and will enable us to provide more personalised, efficient and sustainable services. Importantly, it also allows us to manage and optimise RAN equipment from multiple vendors through a single, unified platform, maintaining the diversity and flexibility that are core principles of O-RAN.” Samsung noted that its RIC “supports both legacy hardware-based and open virtualised networks, allowing Telus to implement intelligent automation across its entire network infrastructure,” and supports third-party applications “ensuring Telus can leverage the best innovations across the industry.” Samsung’s RIC application portfolio includes its KPI Anomaly Detector (KAD) and RAN Anomaly Insight (RAI) to proactively identify and analyse network issues, an Energy Saving Manager (ESM) to perform dynamic traffic prediction and automated orchestration of diverse energy-saving features and its Load Balancing Manager (LBM) to optimise resource utilisation and improve network performance and reliability. 

Following the announcement of its initial public offering (IPO) plans in late August, SASE (secure access service edge) specialist Netskope’s shares started trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market today under the ticker symbol NTSK. Just ahead of its debut, the company decided to price the 47.8 million shares it is listing at $19 each, giving it a total sum raised of $908.2m, higher than expected. The company has more than 4,300 customers for its secure connectivity services and is currently operating at an annual revenue run rate of just over $700m. 

The value of the global network security sector reached $6.4bn in the second quarter of 2025, up by 8% year on year, according to research firm Dell’Oro Group. “The expansion was driven by double-digit gains in security service edge (SSE) and application delivery controllers (ADC), as enterprises adopted AI-aware application protection and platform consolidation strategies to streamline operations and enhance defences,” it noted. Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, stated: “Enterprise buyers are rewarding vendors that integrate AI-aware inspection and consolidate management consoles, and this mix shift will persist as organisations recalibrate hardware footprints and embrace cloud application-centric architectures.” Dell’Oro expects the value of the global network security sector to be worth more than $26bn this year. 

– The staff, TelecomTV