Verizon CEO Dan Schulman revealed in the company’s Q2 earnings call it had struck a deal worth more than $1 billion with Google for data centre connectivity, while teasing other agreements will be announced before the end of the year.

Schulman said it will provide dark fibre connectivity for Google’s data centres, before adding it expects to announce other deals which together will be worth “multiple billions of dollars in revenue over the next several years”.

Details about the Google partnership were not disclosed in its second quarter earnings statement.

Over the period, Schulman stated its results provide “clear, compelling evidence” a recent shake-up to its consumer plans “is driving a structural inflection point across our entire business”.

“We are accelerating across our key metrics, achieving a step-change in churn reduction while lowering our customer acquisition and retention costs,” he said, while adding its core connectivity business is gaining momentum and the emergence of AI infrastructure revenue was helping reshape its growth trajectory.

Simplified service plans and a new loyalty rewards programme helped the company draw 184,000 postpaid phone net additions during the quarter, representing the highest gains in the segment in the past five years. Mobile and broadband net additions tallied up to 550,000, up 230,000 year-on-year.

Total revenue was broadly flat at $34.4 billion. Mobility and broadband service revenue hit $23.4 billion, a 2.8% increase, but this was offset by a nearly 20% decline in equipment revenue due to lower upgrade volumes.

Net income dropped 22.9% to $3.9 billion, primarily driven by a $1.8 billion hit in pre-tax special items including a $746 million loss related to its international wireline and managed network services business.

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Indian IT company HCLTech teamed with AI start-up Sarvam to build a data centre in the eastern state of Odisha, tapping increasing demand for the technology and cloud computing.

The project is expected to cost around INR142.6 billion ($1.5 billion), with financial assistance from the government of Odisha, HCLTech stated.

It pitched the data centre as central to boosting sovereign AI and the local developer ecosystem, employing the full-stack of its capabilities with the technology along with Sarvam’s foundation models to tailor services for private and public sector enterprises.

The company stated the data centre would also help to deliver multi-lingual AI-based services in line with calls from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the technology to benefit all citizens.

HCLTech is building its relationship with Sarvam AI after acquiring a 10.5% stake in the business for $150 million.

This month, it struck a $1.1 billion deal with an unnamed European company.

HCLTech CEO and MD C Vijayakumar said the data centre in Odisha is an important milestone in its full stack AI play, explaining the state offers “a progressive policy environment backed by excellent infrastructure”.

In November 2025, rival Tata Consultancy Services also announced plans to develop AI data centres in partnership with private equity company TPG and investing around $2 billion.

HCLTech separately outlined a plan to open a technology centre in the city of Bhubaneswar, also in Odisha.

It intends for the site to be operational by 2028, housing around 5,000 employees.

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T-Mobile US CEO Srini Gopalan (pictured) insisted its second quarter earnings are proof its strategy is working, highlighting the success of customer-focussed initiatives which are leading to a surge in adoption of its premium packages.

Gopalan stated the company’s strategy is simple: “give customers the best network, the best value and the best experience, all in one place.”

“That’s how we eliminate trade-offs for our customers, and that’s what sets us apart, and our results represent another proof point that our strategy is working,” he added.

Since taking on the role in November 2025, Gopalan has changed the reporting structure in results announcements to no longer reveal changes in wireless customer additions.

However, it recorded net account additions of 277,000 in Q2, a 13% decrease year-on-year but up quarterly by 60,000.

Speaking to Reuters, COO Jon Freier stated a push towards more lucrative subscriber plans, which include customer loyalty incentives, unlimited data and device upgrades, is beginning to pay-off.

“We are seeing new customers really kind of adopt our most premium plans at a rate of about 60% of total sales,” he said.

Total sales for the quarter increased 8% to $22.8 billion, with total service revenue up the same amount to just shy of $19 billion. Net income was broadly flat at $3.2 billion, due to the impact of related costs on its UScellular merger.  

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GSMA Intelligence estimated the cost of replacing equipment made by so-called high risk vendors (HRV) from telecoms networks in Europe will cost between €30 billion to €40 billion, based on data from operators representing almost half of the market.

In the study, independently commissioned and sponsored by seven operator groups, GSMA Intelligence put the cost of replacing mobile networks at €16 billion to €22 billion, equating to around €30 to €42 per mobile connection. This is driven by high exposure to HRV equipment and the cost of replacing equipment such as base stations.

Fixed network costs will hit up to €5 billion, representing the costs of fibre terminals, gateways and fixed wireless equipment. Transport networks, which includes optical switches, multiplexers and amplifiers will cost between €9 billion and €12 billion.

The figures cover only direct equipment replacement and exclude write-offs of existing assets, disruption cost, capacity constraints and broader impacts on future investment plans.

Higher prices
GSMA Intelligence further warned excluding HRV’s could reduce competitive pressure, leading to a 24% price increase in mobile network equipment, 19% in fixed network equipment and 10% in transport network equipment.

Higher prices would therefore raise operator investment costs by €8.5 billion between 2027 and 2030, with current budgets for mobile networks set at nearly €42 billion.

The European Commission outlined a proposal making it mandatory to “de-risk” European mobile telecoms networks from high-risk third party suppliers in January, as part of revisions to its Cybersecurity Act.

Over a five year period, it estimated phasing out equipment could lead to annual costs of €3.4 billion to €4.3 billion for operators, while investment in “trusted suppliers” could grow up to €2 billion per year.

Operators Deutsche Telekom, Fastweb, MEO, Orange, Telefonica, United Group and Vodafone Group took part in the GSMA Intelligence study, which was based on limited datasets provided by third parties.

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AMD outlined plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of a wider deal for the AI company to add 2 gigawatts of computing capacity to its platform, with deployment set to begin in the first half of 2027.

The duo stated it had struck the strategic partnership to address the extraordinary pace of AI adoption, which is driving rapid growth in demand for training and inference capacity,

Anthropic said it was scaling up its compute infrastructure to serve strong and growing demand for Claude and acquiring AMD’s latest AI server chips “represents a major expansion of AMD’s position at the centre of the global AI infrastructure buildout”.

Deployment of the first gigawatt of AMD’s Helios platform will begin in the first half of 2027. No timescale was given to complete deployment.

In addition, the pair stated they are launching a multiyear engineering collaboration to accelerate AMD software deployment with Claude and the company will adopt the model across its engineering and product development teams.

Details on the $5 billion commitment from AMD into Anthropic were sparse, but it will be dependent on meeting certain milestones. Anthropic has also secured billions in investment from Google and Amazon.

Lisa Su, CEO and chair at AMD, said the deal will help it establish “Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure”.

Chief compute officer and co-founder of Anthropic Tom Brown added access to compute is “central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers”.

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