What’s up with… Mistral AI, Telecom Italia, NTT & private 5G

• Mistral AI raises $830m for AI infrastructure deployment
• Telecom Italia is ending its towers deal with Inwit
• NTT claims private 5G gains from RIC deployment

In today’s industry news roundup: France AI giant Mistral AI has raised debt funding to build out its Nvidia tech-based AI datacentre; Telecom Italia is the latest telco to cut ties with towers firm Inwit; NTT hails the potential of using a RAN intelligent controller to manage a private 5G network; and more!

Mistral AI, the Paris-based generative AI developer at the heart of French and European sovereign AI developments, has raised $830m in debt financing from a consortium of “top-tier global banks” to help fund operations at its datacentre near Paris, in Bruyères-le-Châtel, France. “This will finance Nvidia Grace Blackwell infrastructure with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, and bring our powered capacity to 44MW,” noted the company in this LinkedIn post, adding that the debt funding shows the confidence of the banks in Mistral AI’s vision – “Europe needs an ambitious AI cloud infrastructure and an independent AI stack,” it stated. The AI company, which raised €1.7bn in a funding round last September, added that it is “building 200MW of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027 to support the demand from governments and enterprises that seek to build and control their own AI.” 

As expected, Telecom Italia (TIM) has joined its peer, Fastweb+Vodafone, by announcing its intention to terminate its master service agreement with Italian towers firm Infrastrutture Wireless Italiane (Inwit). Telecom Italia, which is aiming to create a new company with Fastweb+Vodafone that would develop and manage up to 6,000 new tower sites across Italy, says it’s waiting to see how negotiations and/or any legal battle between Fastweb+Vodafone and Inwit play out, but that if Fastweb+Vodafone gets the green light to cancel its agreement, Telecom Italia plans to follow suit by ending its relationship with Inwit as soon as 31 March 2028. Inwit last week described Fastweb+Vodafone’s move as “unlawful”. Telecom Italia, which is currently mulling a €10.8bn takeover offer, says its decision to part ways with Inwit is linked to its “ongoing effort to optimise its infrastructure cost base, consistent with the initiatives recently announced to the market, and falls within TIM’s ordinary operational and industrial optionality in managing its infrastructure perimeter and commercial relationships.”

Giant Japanese telco NTT has concluded a multi-year Private 5G Optimization Project that aimed to accelerate the expansion and adoption of multi-vendor private 5G networks through “further cost reduction and enhanced convenience” with the publication of a report that shows how the deployment of a RAN intelligent controller (RIC) can help to make private 5G networks more efficient. According to NTT, the report’s findings show that “integration costs in multi-vendor configurations can be reduced, flexible equipment selection tailored to specific use cases will be promoted, and energy efficiency and more effective spectrum utilisation will be accelerated through autonomous control of base stations (RAN) using RIC.” The RIC used in the project was developed (based on O-RAN Alliance specifications) and provided by Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), while vendors such as Airspan, HPE, NEC and Nokia were among the 26 companies that supplied network tech elements for the project.  

Vodafone Group has hailed a new landmark in its sustainability partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) after reaching their goal of collecting 1 million phones and raising £1m towards conservation projects. The One Million Phones for the Planet campaign sees Vodafone donate £1 to WWF environmental projects for every phone collected from customers and the public across Europe and Africa, whilst also promoting the circular economy. The project launched in November 2022 and the funds generated so far have been used on several projects, running from a UK initiative aimed at returning oysters to the Firth of Forth for the first time in a century, to using technology to protect wildlife, such as lions and elephants in Kenya, to boosting marine protected areas in Greece.

Vantiva, the Paris-based broadband customer premises equipment (CPE) and video systems vendor formerly known as Technicolor, has reported a 7% dip in revenues to €1.74bn but a 33.4% increase in adjusted EBITDA to €145m for the full year 2025, “driven by cost efficiency and the synergies from the integration of CommScope’s Home Networks business (HN). CEO Tim O’Loughlin noted: “The year ahead shows potential for underlying strength in broadband demand with regionalised video demand, offset by some macro challenges like memory. Still, I am confident that our people and disciplined business processes will enable us to meet our goals.”

– The staff, TelecomTV