MWC25: How Red Hat is Leveraging AI to Transform Telcos

Red Hat unveiled a series of telco-driven partnerships at MWC Barcelona 2025, highlighting the integration of AI into network infrastructure as a central component of its strategy.

The company announced collaborations with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI and Orange, signalling its commitment to embedding AI capabilities across the telecommunications industry.

Hanen Garcia, Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat, shared details about how the company continues to expand its partner ecosystem and development strategy. Having been at Red Hat for almost a decade, he shares his excitement over the company’s strategic direction.

“Since we started working with telcos, we have understood how important it is to partner within the ecosystem,” he says. “Within the last year, we have been increasing the size of our ecosystem by bringing critical partners in.”

AI-driven power optimisation solutions

The partnership with SoftBank focuses specifically on AI-driven power optimisation solutions, representing a practical implementation of machine learning algorithms to address energy efficiency in telecommunications networks.

Red Hat is also expanding its work with Fujitsu to deliver virtualised radio access network (vRAN) solutions on Red Hat OpenShift, incorporating AI capabilities into network management.

Hanen shares: “The work that we are doing on vRAN sees us also collaborating with other partners like Ericsson and Nokia to transform telco networks.

“There is a constant evolution within these ecosystems and we are looking at bringing even more partners on so we are ready together to help customers on whatever challenges they have on the current technology or the next evolution of the technology.”

Red Hat's strategy involves constructing an ecosystem of specialised partners capable of addressing the computational requirements of AI-enhanced telecommunications networks. These partnerships span from semiconductor manufacturers to network function vendors.

Looking ahead, the company is focused on continuing support for the telco industry’s transition from network function virtualisation (NFV) to cloud-native platforms.

“I can talk for a long time about that,” Hanen shares. “Since the evolution of network virtualisation, we have been working with customers and the ecosystem and have found there is a devolution that’s happening now, from virtualisation to the cloud-native platform.

“There have been some announcements from us around that with KDDI and also T-Mobile, who has selected the Red Hat platform for the evolution of the network itself,” says Hanen. “So we are constantly looking into that evolution, serving the customers, bringing the right size and the right mix between our capabilities - not only on the cloud platform that we deliver, but also working with our hardware partners as well.”

Key partnerships power AI

The platform development now extends to hardware partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers including Intel, Arm and Nvidia, companies that have become central to the AI ecosystem through their specialised processors for machine learning workloads.

Introducing AI capabilities into the platform represents the next phase in telecommunications network transformation for Red Hat.

Hanen explains: “We are looking at introducing AI into some capabilities in the network, but also at how the technology would serve other customers with those capabilities.

“We are bringing that into the same platform so that the customer has consistency when managing the network

The implementation of AI within radio access networks through its collaborations with Fujitsu and SoftBank represents a practical application of machine learning for telecommunications infrastructure.

“Introducing AI into the radio access network is crucial and will accelerate the transformation that has been happening on the networks so far,” Hanen says.

As one of the leading platforms on cloud transformation, Red Hat is eager to maintain its focus on future network evolutions, including 5G Advanced. In order to achieve this, the company works closely with open source communities to find new ways of using AI within its platform.

“We are right now moving from 4G to 5G. While there are plenty of 5G deployments, the next wave 5G Advanced is not far away,” Hanen shares. “So we are looking at the next evolution of our platform and what capabilities we need to support these continued evolutions across the network.

“With the open source community, we bring together all of the innovation across those communities into the platform so that the customer can benefit as soon as possible from those technology advancements.”

At MWC Barcelona 2025, Red Hat showcased some of these developments via demonstrations focused on platform lifecycle management and network operations enhancement, highlighting how AI can work to optimise network management.

When asked by us about what he is most excited to showcase, Hanen says: “We are now moving towards how we can actually manage the lifecycle of the platform itself, especially for our customers, and how we are bringing our partner ecosystem into the management of that lifecycle.

“We are also sharing how our customers can use AI to actually improve their networks.”

Explore the latest edition of AI Magazine and be part of the conversation at our global conference series, Tech & AI LIVE. 

Discover all our upcoming events and secure your tickets today.

AI Magazine is a BizClik brand