• Swisscom hooks up with Cisco’s Outshift for agentic AI 
• Huawei develops AI chip designed to rival Nvidia’s H100
• IBM plans $150bn US investment

In today’s industry news roundup: Cisco’s Outshift and Swisscom team up on agentic AI to reduce service costs and downtime and boost customer experience; Huawei is on the lookout for partners with which to test AI chips with the potential to outperform Nvidia’s H100 GPUs; IBM cosies up to the White House with plans for a five-year spending splurge in the US; and much more!

Outshift, the “research, development, and incubation engine” of Cisco Systems, has teamed up with Swisscom to develop agentic AI applications that can help the Swiss telco make changes to its services in a way that is efficient, cost effective and customer friendly. “The goal of getting into an agentic AI world, operating networks, and connectivity is all about reducing the impact of service changes, reducing the risk of downtime and costs – therefore leveling up our customer experience,” stated Swisscom’s CTO Mark Düsener. The aim of the engagement is to reduce service change costs, minimise the potential of disruption and downtime, and improve network reliability and service quality which, in turn, lead to an enhanced customer experience. “We are working towards a vision of a network domain in which engineers can trust AI and AI agents to reduce impact and run the network operations competently, allowing them to work in a more forward-looking capacity, focusing on improving design, process and customer experience,” stated Düsener. Read more. 

Chinese tech giant Huawei is seeking partners to test its latest homegrown AI processor which, according to The Wall Street Journal, has processing capabilities that could potentially exceed those of Nvidia’s popular H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) chips. Huawei is expected to have the first batch of samples of its new Ascend 910D processor, which are designed to be used for large language model (LLM) training, by May, the same month the vendor is expected to start mass shipments of its Ascend 910C AI chips to its customers. The news comes in the wake of a recent ruling by US President Donald Trump’s administration that Nvidia will now need an export licence to ship its H20 AI processor, which has proven popular with Chinese customers, such as Alibaba, Bytedance and Tencent. That ruling forced Nvidia to announce in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it will report charges of up to $5.5bn related to “H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves”.   

With the impending impact of the global trade tariff war no doubt in mind, IBM has unveiled plans to invest $150bn in America over the next five years “to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing,” the tech giant announced on Monday morning, making it the latest company to share financial plans that will be well received at the White House. The planned spending spree includes an investment of more than $30bn in R&D to “advance and continue IBM’s American manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers,” the company noted in this announcement. “Technology doesn’t just build the future – it defines it,” stated IBM’s chairman, president and CEO Arvind Krishna. “We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago, and with this investment and manufacturing commitment we are ensuring that IBM remains the epicentre of the world’s most advanced computing and AI capabilities,” he added. The news comes only days after the company announced first-quarter revenues up on a like-for-like, year-on-year basis by 2% to $14.5bn and an operating profit of $1.2bn, up by 8%.   

Octopus Group, a UK utility player well known for its focus on high levels of customer service, is reportedly gearing up to enter the mobile services sector via an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) agreement with Three UK, which is in the process of merging with Vodafone UK. But as ISPreview reports, it’s already tested the UK MVNO market waters in a somewhat underwhelming way.   

The 3GPP and O-RAN Alliance have held a joint workshop (24, 25 April) at the headquarters of ETSI in the south of France that focused on coordinated activities related to 6G, the alliance noted in this announcement. During the workshop, which was attended by 123 individuals from the industry, the participants discussed “coordination areas between the two organisations” and covered topics such as interoperability, scheduling and the “appropriate separation of roles – aiming to avoid fragmentation and support aligned 6G development efforts, and to ensure 6G specifications from both organisations be available to the global ecosystem at the same time.” 

India’s third-largest telco, Vodafone Idea (Vi), has followed up its initial launch of 5G services in Mumbai in March with an expansion of its live 5G service coverage in the north-west Chandigarh region (including Chandigarh, Mohali, Zirakpur and Kharar) and Patna in the north-east of the country. In addition, at the start of April, Vi made its 5G services available in and around cricket stadiums in 11 major Indian cities. And in order to support the anticipated growth in data traffic on its network, Vi has deployed MPLS routers from Cisco in its 4G and 5G backhaul transport network. 

– The staff, TelecomTV