Bharti Airtel Partners with IBM to Strengthen Airtel Cloud and Accelerate AI-Driven Enterprise Transformation
The collaboration brings together Airtel’s telco-grade reliability and data security with IBM’s advanced AI and hybrid cloud technologies to serve enterprises across regulated sectors.
New Delhi/Mumbai/Armonk (NY), October 15: Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to augment its recently launched Airtel Cloud platform. The collaboration brings together Airtel’s telco-grade reliability and data security with IBM’s advanced AI and hybrid cloud technologies to serve enterprises across regulated sectors.
The partnership will help enterprises in industries such as banking, healthcare, and government scale AI workloads efficiently across on-premise, multi-cloud, and edge environments. Airtel Cloud customers will now be able to deploy the IBM Power Systems portfolio as-a-Service, including the latest IBM Power11 AI-ready servers, to support mission-critical applications.
The Power11 hybrid platform will cater to workloads including IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP, with dedicated support for SAP customers migrating to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Bharti Airtel, said the partnership adds “substantial capabilities” to Airtel Cloud. “With IBM, we are addressing the needs of industries requiring migration from IBM Power Systems and enabling AI readiness. We’re also expanding our availability zones in India from four to ten and setting up two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai,” he said.
Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM, said, “Through our partnership with Bharti Airtel, clients across India can leverage IBM’s innovative cloud offerings designed for workloads that address their strategic priorities. Together, we will help clients drive true transformation in the era of AI.”
With IBM’s watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI integrated into the platform, customers will be able to run AI inferencing across hybrid environments and accelerate the deployment of generative AI in enterprise workflows. The joint offering also aligns with IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture, designed to support emerging innovations in AI and quantum computing.
Airtel’s upcoming Multi Zone Regions will help enterprises meet data residency and resilience requirements, keeping mission-critical workloads secure and operational. The Airtel–IBM partnership is expected to accelerate digital innovation for Indian enterprises and strengthen the nation’s cloud infrastructure ecosystem.
