Telco giant Bharti Airtel has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its enterprise cloud portfolio, Airtel Cloud, with AI-enabled infrastructure and software capabilities. The collaboration aims to target large Indian enterprises, especially in regulated sectors such as banking, financial services, healthcare and government, that are accelerating digital transformation but require data residency, compliance and high reliability.
The partnership will combine Airtel Cloud’s secure and locally hosted infrastructure with IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI technologies. Under the deal, Airtel will offer IBM Power systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the newly launched IBM Power11 AI-ready servers, which are designed for mission-critical workloads.
The platform supports IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux workloads as well as SAP Cloud ERP migrations , a key requirement for large enterprises shifting to next-gen ERP systems.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Bharti Airtel, said the collaboration significantly boosts Airtel’s cloud play in India.“Airtel Cloud is designed to be highly secure and compliant, setting new industry benchmarks as an agile and resilient cloud platform. With the IBM partnership, we are adding substantial capabilities to address the unique needs of industries that require migration from IBM Power Systems and AI readiness,” he said.
“With this partnership, we are also extending the footprint of our availability zones in India from four to ten, hosted on our next-gen sustainable data centres. We will also establish two new Multizone Regions in Mumbai and Chennai soon,” Vittal added.
IBM executives said the partnership is anchored in the growing demand for secure AI adoption in enterprises.
“Enterprises today need to balance modernisation with growing regulated technology and AI requirements. Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India can leverage IBM’s innovative cloud offerings designed for workloads that address strategic business priorities,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. “Together, we will help clients drive true transformation in the era of AI.”
The alliance will integrate IBM’s AI inferencing software stack built on watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, enabling enterprises to run domain-specific AI models across hybrid environments. Clients will also gain access to Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including OpenShift Virtualisation and Red Hat AI.
Expanding on IBM’s AI focus, Hans Dekkers, GM, IBM Asia Pacific, said the partnership will help enterprises deploy trustworthy AI at scale.
“When you look at artificial intelligence and governance, enterprises increasingly need small domain-specific models built on their own data. The compute needed to train and infer from these models requires powerful infrastructure,” Dekkers said during a press conference on Wednesday on the sidelines of IBM’s flagship Think 2025 event in Mumbai. “This partnership unlocks that capability. It allows clients to quickly run inferencing, train models efficiently and add governance layers so AI systems behave responsibly, the way enterprises expect them to. That flexibility is what this announcement delivers.”
Airtel said its Multi Zone Regions (MZRs) being rolled out with IBM will help enterprises meet India’s data residency rules and ensure high service uptime. The companies claimed the partnership will accelerate cloud adoption among large Indian organisations that want to modernise legacy workloads without compromising control, security or compliance.
The deal also intensifies competition in India’s enterprise cloud market, where players such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle are stepping up AI and hybrid offerings. |
