Red Hat is charting a comprehensive course for the telecommunications industry, weaving AI deeply into network infrastructure through a expanding ecosystem of strategic partnerships. At MWC Barcelona 2025, the company unveiled a forward-looking telco strategy that emphasizes AI-driven optimization, virtualized and cloud-native network architectures, and a collaborative ecosystem designed to address the evolving needs of modern providers. Through alliances with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange, Red Hat signaled its commitment to embedding AI capabilities across the telecommunications value chain, from hardware accelerators to software platforms and network operations. The company’s leadership presented a multi-faceted plan: grow the partner ecosystem, advance AI-infused platform capabilities on OpenShift, and support telcos as they transition from traditional network function virtualization to cloud-native deployments that unlock new levels of efficiency, agility, and service resilience. The interview with Hanen Garcia, Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat, underlined the strategic importance of partnerships and ecosystem breadth, highlighting the deliberate shift toward bringing critical partners into the fold to accelerate innovation and deliver tangible customer outcomes.
Strategic Imperatives at MWC 2025: A Telco-Centric AI Transformation
The announcements at MWC Barcelona 2025 positioned Red Hat as a central facilitator of AI-enabled transformation for telecommunications providers. Red Hat’s strategy centers on embedding AI capabilities across the network, enabling intelligence to flow through management planes, orchestration layers, and the radio access network itself. The collaborations with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange were presented not merely as marketing milestones but as concrete steps toward a scalable, AI-powered telco fabric. These partnerships are designed to address computational demands, ensure seamless operation of cloud-native services, and accelerate the deployment of AI-driven features that improve performance, reliability, and energy efficiency.
In conversations with Hanen Garcia, the emphasis was on ecosystem expansion as a core driver of momentum. He explained that the telco space requires a robust ecosystem where hardware, software, and network function specialists collaborate to deliver end-to-end solutions. He noted that the ecosystem has grown significantly over the past year as Red Hat has actively brought in critical partners whose capabilities complement the company’s core technology. The strategic intent is clear: by broadening the partner base, Red Hat can offer telcos a more complete, interoperable, and scalable set of AI-enabled tools and services. This approach aligns with the broader industry shift toward open, interoperable platforms that accelerate time to value for operators while reducing the risk of vendor lock-in.
The MWC announcements also highlighted the central goal of embedding AI into the telecommunications stack as a practical, deployable capability. AI-driven power optimization, AI-enabled management of network infrastructure, and AI-assisted deployment and maintenance workflows were described as concrete use cases that telcos can begin implementing now. By focusing on real-world applications such as energy efficiency and rapid software deployment, Red Hat demonstrated how AI can translate into meaningful operational improvements, cost reductions, and faster time-to-service for customers.
In addition to the partner announcements, Red Hat underscored the strategic commitment to cloud-native platforms as the foundation for AI in telecom. The company signaled its intention to support the telco industry’s ongoing transition from network function virtualization to cloud-native architectures, a move that unlocks elasticity, agility, and more sophisticated software-driven capabilities. The content underscored the belief that cloud-native platforms — built on Red Hat OpenShift and allied open-source technologies — are essential for managing the complexity of AI-enabled networks and for enabling seamless evolution to next-generation network paradigms, including 5G Advanced.
Expanding the Telco Partner Ecosystem: A Deliberate Strategy
Red Hat’s approach to expanding its partner ecosystem centers on creating an interconnected network of specialists who can collectively support AI-enhanced telecommunications networks. The company’s strategy goes beyond signing high-profile names; it emphasizes the importance of aligning capabilities across hardware, software, and services to meet the diverse demands of modern operators. The interviews and public statements from Red Hat executives stress that ecosystem breadth is critical to meeting the current and future challenges of telco networks, including reliability, scalability, and energy efficiency.
Hanen Garcia stressed that, since Red Hat began collaborating with telcos, it became evident how vital it is to partner within a broader ecosystem. He pointed out that the last twelve months have seen a deliberate expansion of the ecosystem, bringing in partners whose expertise fills gaps and accelerates joint development. This approach reflects a recognition that AI-powered telco solutions require a multi-faceted constellation of players, each contributing unique strengths — from chip accelerators and infrastructure hardware to RAN software and cloud-native orchestration.
The ecosystem expansion is also framed as a pathway to better serve customers with a balanced mix of capabilities. Red Hat emphasizes not only cloud platform readiness but also the ability to work with hardware partners to ensure end-to-end compatibility and performance. The result is a more cohesive offering that reduces integration risk for operators and accelerates the adoption of AI-enabled features across networks. The emphasis on ecosystem breadth aligns with industry trends toward collaborative innovation rather than siloed, vendor-specific solutions.
In practical terms, the partner ecosystem enables telcos to access a broader array of AI-driven features and optimizations. The OpenShift platform, augmented with AI capabilities, serves as a common backbone for managing heterogeneous network elements, including base stations, core network functions, and edge deployments. This common platform approach reduces fragmentation, enabling operators to deploy AI-driven optimizations across the entire network consistently. It also helps telcos scale AI workloads efficiently, leveraging a diverse set of hardware accelerators and software components.
The MWC-centric strategy further reinforces Red Hat’s commitment to ongoing collaboration with industry leaders. The company’s partnerships with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange are not isolated deals but strategic nodes in a broader, future-ready telco fabric. Each partner brings a defined set of capabilities that, when combined, create a more resilient and capable network environment. For SoftBank, the focus is AI-driven power optimization; for Fujitsu, vRAN deployment on OpenShift; for Rakuten Mobile, enhanced Open RAN and cloud-native infrastructure; for KDDI, minimized downtime and rapid software deployment in an Open RAN context; and for Orange, accelerated telco cloud transformation. The sum of these alliances is a robust, integrated approach to AI-enabled network modernization.
AI-Driven Power Optimization and vRAN on OpenShift: Concrete Implementations
Among the most tangible manifestations of Red Hat’s telco strategy are AI-powered initiatives that translate AI research into real-world network benefits. The SoftBank collaboration, in particular, centers on AI-driven power optimization solutions. This focus embodies a practical application of machine learning algorithms designed to reduce energy consumption and improve efficiency in telecommunications networks. By optimizing power usage dynamically and contextually, telcos can lower operational costs, extend equipment life, and reduce environmental impact, all while maintaining or enhancing network performance.
Parallel to this effort is Red Hat’s expanded collaboration with Fujitsu to deliver virtualized radio access network (vRAN) solutions on Red Hat OpenShift. This partnership integrates AI capabilities into network management, enabling more intelligent control of RAN elements and supporting more adaptable network configurations. As Garcia notes, vRAN work involves collaboration with other major vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia, expanding the ecosystem’s reach and ensuring that telcos can leverage a broader set of innovations to transform their networks. The overarching aim is to create a flexible, AI-enabled RAN environment capable of supporting diverse deployments and evolving requirements, from current 4G/5G networks to future iterations.
There is a continuous evolution within these ecosystems, Garcia explains, and Red Hat is actively seeking to bring additional partners into the fold to prepare for the challenges of today and the next technological evolution. The emphasis on collaboration with multiple vendors demonstrates Red Hat’s commitment to creating interoperable solutions that do not lock operators into a single supplier. By building an AI-powered, open, and extensible platform, telcos can adopt new capabilities quickly as technology advances, while maintaining robust interoperability and service reliability.
A key takeaway from these implementations is the practical voice of AI in action. AI-driven power optimization is not a theoretical concept; it is a real-world tool that telcos can deploy to gain immediate benefits. Similarly, AI-enabled vRAN on OpenShift represents a tangible step toward intelligent, flexible network infrastructure. Operators can leverage AI to automatically tune RAN resources, manage network slices, and optimize performance across varying traffic patterns and service requirements. The combined effect of these deployments is a more energy-efficient, responsive, and resilient network — a critical competitive differentiator in the current telco landscape.
Key partnerships announced at MWC in this area illustrate a broader strategy:
- SoftBank: AI-driven power optimization solutions that target energy efficiency in telecom networks.
- Fujitsu: Delivering vRAN solutions on Red Hat OpenShift, integrating AI into network management.
- Rakuten Mobile: Enhancing Open RAN solutions and cloud-native infrastructure to support AI-enabled operations.
- KDDI: Minimizing downtime and accelerating software deployment with Open RAN, leveraging AI-driven orchestration.
- Orange: Accelerating telco cloud transformation through AI-infused platform capabilities.
These partnerships underscore Red Hat’s mission to build a composite AI-enabled network platform, where software-defined control, AI optimization, and cloud-native infrastructure work in concert with disciplined hardware partnerships to deliver reliable, scalable, and energy-efficient networks.
Beyond SoftBank and Fujitsu, the broader AI platform development integrates semiconductor and processing expertise from Intel, Arm, and Nvidia. These hardware partners are central to delivering the compute performance required by AI workloads in telecommunications environments, where real-time decision-making, ML inference, and complex analytics must operate at scale. Red Hat’s strategy positions these hardware collaborations as essential enablers of AI workloads across the network stack, including RAN, core, and edge components.
In essence, the AI-driven power optimization and vRAN initiatives illustrate how Red Hat translates strategic partnerships into concrete, measurable outcomes. By combining AI capabilities with OpenShift-based orchestration and a diverse partner ecosystem, telcos gain a path to more efficient operations, faster deployments, and a platform capable of supporting continual evolution toward more advanced network architectures and services.
Key Partnerships Powering AI Across the Telco Stack
Red Hat’s MWC 2025 disclosures highlighted a structured, multi-layered partnership model designed to address the entire telco stack — from silicon to network function, from cloud platform to edge orchestration, and from lifecycle management to AI-enabled optimization. The partnerships span a spectrum from semiconductor manufacturers to network function vendors, ensuring that AI-enabled networks can scale and adapt to diverse use cases and deployment environments.
- SoftBank: Focused on AI-driven power optimization solutions that directly impact energy efficiency. The partnership demonstrates how AI can be deployed at the network level to optimize energy use without sacrificing performance or coverage.
- Fujitsu: Responsible for delivering vRAN solutions on Red Hat OpenShift, enabling AI capabilities to be integrated into the management of radio access networks. This collaboration emphasizes the convergence of virtualization, cloud-native platforms, and intelligent control.
- Rakuten Mobile: Concentrated on enhancing Open RAN solutions and building cloud-native infrastructure that can support AI workloads and optimize network performance across distributed deployments.
- KDDI: Aimed at minimizing downtime and accelerating software deployment through the use of Open RAN, with AI-driven orchestration to maintain high service levels and reduce maintenance windows.
- Orange: Dedicated to accelerating telco cloud transformation by leveraging AI-enabled platform capabilities to modernize core and edge environments, enabling more agile service delivery.
In addition to these operator-focused partnerships, Red Hat is actively engaging with chipset manufacturers and platform vendors to ensure the hardware-software alignment required for AI-informed telco operations. The collaboration with Intel, Arm, and Nvidia adds critical compute and acceleration capabilities that empower AI workloads in real-time networking scenarios. The emphasis on hardware-software symmetry ensures that telcos can deploy AI-enhanced functions at scale, with predictable performance and controlled operational costs.
This holistic partner approach aims to deliver end-to-end AI-enabled capabilities across the telco ecosystem, enabling operators to address current needs such as reliability, uptime, and energy efficiency while preparing for future demands driven by AI-driven automation, network intelligence, and cloud-native service delivery. The combination of AI-powered optimization, AI-driven management, and cloud-native orchestration creates a cohesive platform where data-driven insights translate into actionable network improvements.
Garcia reiterates a guiding philosophy that underpins these partnerships: the telco ecosystem is vital to achieving outcomes that benefit customers and operators alike. The platform strategy seeks a balanced blend of cloud-native capabilities, hardware support, and network-specific features designed to address the realities of modern network operations. This philosophy explains why Red Hat emphasizes not only the platform but also the ecosystem surrounding it—the people, the organizations, and the mutual commitments necessary to realize AI-enabled telco transformation.
From NFV to Cloud-Native: The Evolution of Telco Infrastructure
A core thread in Red Hat’s Telco strategy is the transformation of network infrastructure from traditional NFV (network function virtualization) approaches toward cloud-native platforms. The company positions this evolution as a devolution from monolithic or siloed virtualization toward more flexible, service-oriented, cloud-native environments that can scale and adapt with agility. In Garcia’s words, open-source-driven innovation plays a central role in this transition, providing telcos with a pathway to rapid evolution while minimizing vendor lock-in and safeguarding interoperability.
The industry context for this transition includes notable customer endorsements and real-world deployments. Garcia highlights that customers such as KDDI and T-Mobile have chosen Red Hat as a platform enabler for network evolution. The emphasis is not only on deploying new features but also on building the confidence and capacity to manage ongoing software-driven changes across the network lifecycle. The cloud-native paradigm supports more rapid updates, smaller change batches, and safer experimentation with new AI-enabled capabilities. This approach aligns with the broader trend of moving away from rigid, purpose-built appliances toward flexible, software-centric architectures that can be continuously updated and improved.
Red Hat’s strategy also foregrounds 5G Advanced as a key area of focus, acknowledging that as 5G networks mature, the next wave of capabilities will require even more sophisticated AI-enabled orchestration and analytics. Garcia notes that the 5G transition is not static; it continues to unfold as the industry moves from established 5G deployments toward more advanced configurations that demand tighter integration with cloud-native platforms and AI-driven optimization. In this context, open-source communities become critical partners in accelerating innovation. Red Hat emphasizes collaboration with these communities to harvest new ideas, accelerate development cycles, and bring them to customers more quickly.
This transition from NFV to cloud-native is viewed not merely as a technical shift but as a strategic reorientation of telco operations. It involves rethinking how services are delivered, how networks are managed, and how AI can be embedded throughout the infrastructure to extract value at every layer. The procurement and governance models shift too, moving toward modular stacks, standardized interfaces, and interoperable components that permit operators to mix and match capabilities from different vendors while maintaining a cohesive operational posture. The outcome is a more adaptable and resilient network that can evolve with changing traffic patterns, service demands, and regulatory environments.
The MWC dialogues also touched on the strategic importance of continuing alignment with open-source ecosystems. By engaging with open-source communities, Red Hat seeks to ensure transparency, security, and rapid adoption of new AI-enabled features. Open-source contributions enable operators to benefit from shared innovations, avoid duplicative efforts, and participate in shaping the direction of next-generation telco technologies. The joint emphasis on cloud-native platforms, open standards, and collaborative development reinforces Red Hat’s commitment to a future where AI and cloud-native architectures are integral to the fabric of telecommunications networks.
AI Across the RAN: Lifecycle Management, OpenShift, and Network Operations
A central thrust of Red Hat’s demonstrations at MWC Barcelona 2025 centered on AI-enabled capabilities extending to platform lifecycle management and enhanced network operations. The company showcased how AI can assist in managing the lifecycle of the platform itself, including deployment, updates, optimization, and maintenance, while enabling customers to extend AI benefits into day-to-day network operations. This dual focus — lifecycle management and network operations optimization — illustrates a holistic approach to AI integration: one that ensures the platform remains healthy and up-to-date while the network reaps the benefits of intelligent automation and data-driven decision-making.
Garcia framed this approach as a convergence of platform stewardship and partner ecosystem management. The lifecycle focus involves orchestrating the numerous software components, cloud-native services, and hardware resources that constitute a modern telco environment. AI plays a critical role in automating routine tasks, predicting potential failures, and guiding optimization decisions that improve reliability and performance. In addition, the emphasis on lifecycle management dovetails with the broader objective of enabling operators to deploy new services with greater confidence and speed, while maintaining robust governance and security practices.
In parallel, Red Hat’s work on AI-enabled network operations highlights how AI can be applied to maintain, monitor, and optimize network performance in real time. AI can analyze telemetry data, detect anomalies, and propose or implement corrective actions. This translates into faster mean time to recovery (MTTR), improved service uptime, and more efficient resource utilization. The demonstrations at MWC underscored these capabilities, showing how operators can leverage AI to streamline operations across core, transport, and access domains, particularly in cloud-native deployments that involve dynamic, multi-tenant environments.
The open, cloud-native architecture that underpins these AI-enabled capabilities is central to their scalability and reliability. Red Hat’s OpenShift-based platform serves as the unifying substrate for AI workloads, orchestration, and network management. This platform-centric approach helps ensure consistency across the network and simplifies integration across the partner ecosystem. It also allows telcos to apply AI-driven insights consistently across multiple domains — from the RAN to the core and edge — facilitating consistent policy enforcement, security, and quality of service.
The practical implications for operators are meaningful. With platform lifecycle management aided by AI, telcos gain increased operational predictability and the ability to manage complex deployments at scale. AI-driven network operations translate into more proactive maintenance, better incident response, and more efficient use of compute and storage resources. The combination of lifecycle management and AI-enabled network operations positions telcos to deliver more reliable, flexible, and feature-rich services to customers in a rapidly evolving 5G era.
The Telco AI Platform: OpenShift, Open Source, and Hardware Acceleration
Red Hat’s telco AI strategy places a strong emphasis on the platform that binds all AI-enabled capabilities together. OpenShift acts as the common platform, enabling consistent management, orchestration, and lifecycle control for AI-enabled network functions and cloud-native services. The emphasis on a unified platform helps telcos reduce integration friction, standardize operations, and accelerate the delivery of new AI-driven capabilities.
Integral to this platform story is the support from hardware accelerators and semiconductor partners that provide the compute power needed for AI workloads. Intel, Arm, and Nvidia are highlighted as vital contributors to the AI ecosystem for telecommunications. Their silicon technologies enable the high-throughput, low-latency processing required by real-time AI inference, ML training workloads, and analytics at the network edge. By aligning platform capabilities with the strengths of hardware partners, Red Hat ensures that telcos can deploy AI features with the performance and energy efficiency needed for large-scale networks.
In this context, AI capabilities are not isolated to software logic alone; they are embedded into the entire stack — from the hardware accelerators used in servers and edge devices to the software layers that coordinate, orchestrate, and optimize AI workloads. The converged stack of AI-enabled OpenShift, hardware accelerators, and AI-aware network functions creates a robust environment in which AI can generate reliable and scalable outcomes for telcos.
Garcia’s commentary emphasizes that AI is being introduced not only for the sake of adding intelligence but to serve concrete customer needs. The platform is designed to deliver consistency when managing the network, a requirement for operators who demand predictable behavior across diverse deployments. The AI capabilities integrated into the platform are intended to provide reliable automation, reducing manual intervention and enabling operators to manage complex networks with greater confidence.
Red Hat’s approach also includes enabling AI across the radio access network through collaboration with Fujitsu and SoftBank, expanding the potential for AI-driven optimizations directly at the edge of the network. The RAN-specific AI capabilities are designed to accelerate transformation by enabling smarter traffic management, dynamic resource allocation, and more responsive network behavior. This is particularly important as networks expand to handle the demands of 5G and beyond, with greater diversity in service types, user densities, and latency requirements.
The platform’s lifecycle management capabilities are especially salient in the telco context. Operators require the ability to orchestrate, monitor, and optimize a large number of software components across multiple layers and locations. AI can assist by predicting faults, orchestrating updates, and guiding capacity planning. The end result is a more resilient, future-proof platform capable of absorbing new AI features without destabilizing operations. The emphasis on platform lifecycle management as a focal point of AI at MWC underscores Red Hat’s commitment to a stable, scalable AI-driven telco ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: Innovation Roadmap, Cloud-Native Maturity, and Industry Impact
Red Hat’s MWC narrative points toward a multi-year roadmap that envisions deeper cloud-native adoption, broader AI integration, and more expansive open-source collaboration. The company’s strategy is built around sustaining momentum in the telco market by continuously enhancing platform capabilities, expanding the partner ecosystem, and delivering measurable benefits to operators. The emphasis on cloud-native maturity and AI readiness is designed to ensure telcos can adapt quickly to evolving standards, regulatory requirements, and emerging service models, while maintaining strong governance and security.
A central element of the forward-looking plan is the continued evolution toward 5G Advanced and beyond. Red Hat recognizes that 5G as deployed today will mature into more sophisticated configurations that demand enhanced AI orchestration, smarter edge capabilities, and more dynamic service delivery. The company’s OpenShift platform, together with AI-enabled tooling and ongoing engagement with open-source communities, provides a continuous loop of innovation that telcos can leverage to remain competitive as technology landscapes shift.
Another key aspect of the roadmap is the broader adoption of AI across network management and operations. Red Hat envisions AI-driven lifecycle management and network optimization as standard practice, enabling operators to automate routine maintenance, optimize energy usage, and improve service reliability at scale. The ongoing collaboration with hardware partners such as Intel, Arm, and Nvidia ensures that telcos have access to the latest accelerators to sustain ever-growing AI workloads. As operators pursue more complex services, including enhanced mobile broadband, edge computing, and mission-critical applications, Red Hat’s platform is positioned to serve as the backbone for resilient, AI-powered networks.
The open-source dimension remains central to Red Hat’s strategy. By partnering with open-source communities, Red Hat aims to accelerate innovation, reduce time-to-value for customers, and improve the transparency and security of AI-enabled telco solutions. Operators benefit from faster access to new capabilities, better interoperability, and the ability to influence the direction of platform development through collaborative contributions. This alignment with open standards and community-driven innovation reinforces the long-term viability of AI-enabled telco transformations.
Through all these initiatives, Red Hat’s emphasis remains on practical outcomes for telcos and their customers. The company’s AI-infused platform strategy seeks to deliver tangible improvements in energy efficiency, network reliability, deployment speed, and overall service quality. By combining AI-powered optimization with cloud-native agility and a broad ecosystem of partners, Red Hat aims to provide operators with a scalable and resilient framework that supports ongoing digital transformation across the telecommunications industry.
Conclusion
Red Hat’s MWC Barcelona 2025 revelations underscore a deliberate, multi-faceted strategy to embed AI deeply into telecommunications networks, supported by a growing ecosystem of strategic partners. The collaboration with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange reflects a concerted effort to bring AI capabilities to the core, edge, and radio access components of modern networks, while also enabling intelligent management, lifecycle optimization, and cloud-native operations. By expanding the partner ecosystem and aligning hardware accelerators from Intel, Arm, and Nvidia with a robust OpenShift-based platform, Red Hat provides telcos with a scalable path to AI-enabled transformation.
The emphasis on AI-driven power optimization, vRAN on OpenShift, and cloud-native evolution signals a shift toward more energy-efficient, agile, and resilient networks. As telcos move from NFV toward cloud-native platforms, Red Hat’s strategy — anchored in open standards, open-source collaboration, and a diversified partner network — positions the company as a pivotal enabler of AI-powered telecom modernization. The road ahead includes continued innovation in 5G Advanced, edge computing, and intelligent network operations, all guided by a commitment to interoperability, security, and measurable customer value. In this evolving landscape, Red Hat’s telco initiative aims to deliver practical, scalable AI capabilities that empower operators to meet current demands and prepare for the next wave of network innovation.