89% of industry respondents are building their artificial intelligence strategies on open models and software, according to NVIDIA’s State of AI in Telecommunications report. Carriers use open-source architectures to control autonomous networks and customer care workloads while avoiding high licensing costs.
Why Operators Pivot Past Closed Models
Evaluations like the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2 demonstrate that top open models are increasingly rivaling proprietary alternatives across complex tasks involving reasoning, software development, science, and agentic workflows. For telecom providers, this narrowing capability gap unlocks a fivefold strategic advantage:
- Operators gain access to top-tier intelligence more affordably, leaving them free to deploy closed models specifically where they yield the maximum return.
- Deep customization capabilities using open weights and training recipes fine-tuned on network, customer and industry data.
- Greater visibility into model artifacts, ensuring compliance with regulations and business policies.
- Flexible, secure deployment across public clouds, private infrastructure, and edge environments.
- The ability to host and fine-tune models locally to deliver specialized AI services to enterprise and government clients.
SoftBank and AT&T Operationalize Open Foundations
Major carriers are already pushing open architectures past the testing phase and into live production environments. SoftBank Corp. utilizes the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models to build its SoftBank Large Telecom Model.
“Open models allow SoftBank Corp. to build on the rapid progress of global foundation models while applying the network knowledge and operational expertise we have accumulated over many years,” said Rajeev Koodli, principal fellow of SoftBank Corp. and senior vice president of SB Telecom America. “We are using open foundations extensively, including NVIDIA Nemotron models and others, in developing our SoftBank Large Telecom Model, continuously advancing it for telecom-specific use cases such as network operations, design and overall management.”
NVIDIA has accelerated this trend by collaborating with AdaptKey to release the 30-billion-parameter Nemotron 3 Large Telco Model (LTM). Fine-tuned on open-source telecom datasets, the model understands industry-specific terminology to handle complex tasks like network configuration and customer incident triage.
Carriers also demand flexibility in how they combine models. “At AT&T, we believe the future of AI is not about choosing a single model; it’s about intelligently matching every workload to the right combination of performance, cost and control,” said Andy Markus, chief data and AI officer of AT&T. “Open models are essential to that approach, and with NVIDIA, we can bring that model-choice strategy into production with the scale, reliability and governance our business requires.”
NVIDIA Software Helps Indonesia Develop Local AI Models
Bringing autonomous operations into production requires more than baseline model weights. Operators deploy specialized pipelines using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit to anonymize sensitive records, generate synthetic datasets, and orchestrate secure runtime environments.
These capabilities align directly with national AI strategies. In Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison uses open models to develop Sahabat-AI, a family of open-source models designed to reflect local languages and cultural nuances.
“For countries like Indonesia, the value of open models goes beyond access to powerful AI. It is about adapting that intelligence to our own language, culture, data and real-world needs,” said Chirag Sukhadia, chief data and AI officer of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison. “Sahabat-AI puts this into practice, using open models as a foundation to build AI that understands Indonesia and can be developed for local applications. This allows us not only to adopt AI, but to build capabilities around it and enable more Indonesians to create with AI on their own terms.”
