Bharti Airtel partners with IBM to boost Airtel Cloud capabilities

Bharti Airtel announced a strategic partnership with IBM on October 15, 2025, to augment its Airtel Cloud platform. This collaboration aims to merge Airtel Cloud's telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency with IBM's cloud solutions and AI inferencing technologies. The partnership will enable enterprises in regulated industries to efficiently scale AI workloads, supporting interoperability across various infrastructures, including on-premise, cloud, and edge environments.

Under this alliance, Airtel Cloud customers will gain access to IBM Power systems as-a-Service, including the latest Power11 servers designed for critical applications and AI-ready workloads. These systems will support enterprise workloads such as IBM Power AIX, IBM i, Linux, and SAP Cloud ERP, facilitating transformations to SAP Cloud ERP on IBM Power Virtual Server.

The partnership will expand Airtel's availability zones in India from four to ten, utilizing next-gen sustainable data centers, with new Multizone Regions planned for Mumbai and Chennai. IBM's AI inferencing software stack, built on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI, will allow clients to run AI inference across hybrid cloud environments, complementing IBM's enterprise-grade cloud platform and automation portfolio.