MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecommunications operator, has announced a strategic partnership with IBM to integrate the American technology firm’s portfolio of services into its recently introduced cloud platform.
The collaboration is a response to the surging demand for computing capacity in India, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence and specific regulatory requirements for localized data storage.
Under this agreement, clients of Airtel Cloud will gain access to deploy IBM’s solutions, including AI-ready server infrastructure tailored for applications in regulated sectors such as banking, healthcare, and government.
This development follows closely on the heels of Google’s announcement of a $15 billion investment to build an AI data center in Andhra Pradesh. Bharti Airtel is also a partner in that venture, collaborating with Google to establish the facility in the port city of Visakhapatnam.
The Airtel Cloud platform was launched in August by the company’s digital unit, Xtelify.
Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bharti Airtel, stated that the two companies will soon establish two new Multizone Regions (MZRs) in Mumbai and Chennai. MZRs represent a cloud infrastructure architecture distributed across multiple physical locations within a geographic area. This design enhances resilience by ensuring data and operations remain secure and continuous even if an issue affects one specific zone.
The companies said this infrastructure will assist Indian businesses in complying with data residency mandates and in maintaining the constant availability of their mission-critical workloads and applications.
