Bharti Airtel’s digital arm, Xtelify, on Monday launched Airtel Cloud — a sovereign, telco-grade cloud platform developed in India —along with an AI-powered software suite designed for telecom operators worldwide. The move signals Airtel’s ambitions to monetise its internal digital infrastructure and expand into the global software market, currently dominated by major players like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company has already secured partnerships with Singtel, Globe Telecom and Airtel Africa to deploy the platform across both operational and customer-facing functions.
A Telco-Grade Cloud with AI Tools—but No LLM Ambitions
While the suite features generative AI tools and proprietary AI pipelines, Airtel made it clear that it has no intention of building a foundational Large Language Model (LLM) from scratch.
“Airtel does not plan to build its own LLM. The cost of building and training such models is astronomical, and the utility for a telco-specific context does not justify the investment right now,” said Gopal Vittal, vice-chairman and MD of Airtel at a press conference on Monday.
Airtel Cloud has been engineered to handle over 140 crore transactions per minute for Airtel’s domestic applications. Xtelify now aims to extend this infrastructure to Indian enterprises, offering up to 40% cloud cost savings, secure migration, and full data localisation.
Beyond Telco: Airtel Eyes Regulated Sectors and Enterprise Clients
The launch comes at a critical juncture, as Airtel Business—Airtel’s B2B arm—reported a 2.7% year-on-year revenue decline to ?5,315 crore in the March quarter, partly due to its strategic exit from the low-margin wholesale segment.
Vittal also noted that with the upcoming Digital Personal Data Protection Law, hosting data within India will strengthen their value proposition and help make a stronger case to potential enterprise clients.
At the core of Airtel’s sovereign cloud offering is its data centre subsidiary, Nxtra, which handles the company’s cloud and storage needs.
While Vittal did not disclose specific revenue targets for the sovereign cloud business, he emphasised that Airtel’s platform is tailored to meet the stringent data localization requirements faced by regulated sectors such as banking and insurance, which often cannot use public cloud services.
“This isn’t just a short-term play for a quarter or two. This marks the beginning of Airtel showcasing its capabilities to operate in a very different and significant space,” Vittal remarked.
As telcos globally look to modernise operations and control costs, Xtelify is positioning itself as a plug-and-play transformation partner—a model similar to that pursued by Reliance Jio Platforms and other telcos with captive tech IP.
Beyond telecom partnerships, Airtel’s leadership confirmed that they are in active discussions with 50–60 companies across sectors such as banking and manufacturing, who have expressed interest in adopting Airtel Cloud.