Nvidia pushes telcos toward Level 4-5 autonomous network operations

Nvidia is positioning its software stack — NeMo, NIM, and the Nemotron-based LTM — as the operating layer for autonomous telecom networks, creating significant vendor lock-in once operators build agents and workflows on top. For streaming providers, the implication is upstream: if telcos become AI grids selling inference compute, the economics of edge-delivered video processing, real-time encoding, and content-aware networking could shift as telcos monetize distributed GPU capacity. Watch whether SK Telecom or T-Mobile announce concrete AI grid commercialization timelines in H2 2026.

GSMA's Open Telco AI initiative, launched March 2, 2026 at MWC Barcelona, provides the broader industry backdrop for Nvidia's push. Per GSMA's launch announcement, only 16% of telecoms' GenAI deployments have been applied to network operations, and general-purpose frontier models underperform on telecom-specific tasks. The initiative includes open models from AT&T, a Large Telco Model from AdaptKey AI built on NVIDIA Nemotron, and compute resources from AMD and TensorWave, with contributing partners spanning operators from KDDI to Vodafone.

SK Telecom's commitment extends well beyond exploration. On June 7, 2026, per NVIDIA's newsroom, SK Telecom announced plans to build a gigawatt-scale AI Cloud in Korea using the NVIDIA DSX platform, with the first AI factory coming online in 2027. SKT will become an NVIDIA Cloud Partner, and SK Group plans joint research with NVIDIA on future AI factory architectures.

At MWC 2026 in February, per Mobile Europe, a coalition including BT Group, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, SK Telecom, SoftBank, and T-Mobile committed to building 6G infrastructure on AI-native platforms. T-Mobile separately demonstrated GPU-accelerated AI-RAN workloads at its Seattle innovation center, showing concurrent AI and RAN processing on a single NVIDIA Grace Hopper 200 server with use cases including video streaming and AI-based video captioning.

Per Nvidia's own blog coverage of DTW Ignite 2026 (June 2026), additional partners demonstrated at the conference: ServiceNow brought Project Arc for autonomous network operations center agents, NTT DATA used Nemotron with NemoClaw for proactive anomaly detection, and Amdocs showcased autonomous customer-care agents. Nvidia also noted that 54% of operators cite data-related issues as their biggest barrier to building telecom-aware AI models.