Building the foundation for an AI-driven, sovereign future with Red Hat partners

At Red Hat, we believe the telecommunications landscape is entering its most transformative chapter yet. To thrive, telecommunications service providers must transcend their traditional role as connectivity providers to become indispensable enablers of digital autonomy. 

As we head to MWC Barcelona, the industry conversation has reached a decisive pivot. We have moved past the early phase of experimentation into a period of structured industrialization where the question is no longer "what if," but rather "where is the value?".

With this in mind, our focus this year with Red Hat’s partner ecosystem is clear: enabling our customers to finalize their migration from legacy virtualization, operationalizing AI-native networks, and securing the digital sovereignty of their global infrastructure and services. All with their clear ROI in sight.

Unlocking success through co-innovation

We are reaching a tipping point where IT modernization is increasingly vital, yet the imperative to adopt AI is exposing technical debt. For 2026, our mandate is to move our customers from  managing fragmented silos to managing a cohesive network that future-proofs their investments.

Our ecosystem is critical to accelerating this journey. The common telco cloud—built on Red Hat OpenShift, which unifies virtual machines (VMs) and containers—is not just an architecture; it is a powerful enabler that allows our partners to deliver pre-validated, next-generation network functions (CNFs) and IT applications at speed. This co-innovation can significantly reduce service deployment times from months to minutes, so service providers can rapidly evolve their networks with solutions built by the world’s most trusted technology companies.

Cultivating an AI-native ecosystem

As service providers are shifting to fuel their AI ambitions with applications like autonomous network operations (ANO) and AI as a service, their core challenge becomes the scale and complexity of the underlying infrastructure.

Together with our partners, we are building AI factories — digital infrastructures designed to automate the large-scale development, deployment and lifecycle management of AI applications. By using automated data pipelines and a large choice of supported hardware accelerators, service providers can fix problems preemptively, optimize radio access networks (RAN) dynamically, and auto-scale resources to meet fluctuating demand tailored to their preferences. 

Securing the future

For many service providers, digital sovereignty is no longer a buzzword but a huge business opportunity. This year, we expect to see sovereignty move from a strategic aspiration to a procurement reality, where the ability to independently verify the integrity of the entire technology stack is a prerequisite for every new contract.

Red Hat's open source technology provides the essential technical sovereignty by decoupling software from hardware. Combined with Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud architecture it is giving service providers more control and choice. Crucially, our broad ecosystem of local and regional partners provides the operational and technology sovereignty required to meet complex B2B and government demands. These partners give providers verified options for storing and processing data locally, ensuring sensitive information remains within specific jurisdictions and fulfilling the non-negotiable requirements of new regulatory and contractual obligations.

The path forward

The power of our ecosystem lies in its openness. No single vendor can solve the challenges of sovereignty, 5G (soon to be 6G), edge, and AI alone. For that reason Red Hat provides the common, cloud-native foundation that acts as an ecosystem unifier, enabling seamless integration, co-innovation with our partners, across any application on any hardware and any cloud. This software foundation provides flexibility and choice turning networks from cost centers into profit centers.

I look forward to discussing these priorities further at MWC Barcelona. Let’s build a future that is not just connected, but intelligent and sovereign. In the meantime, learn more about Red Hat’s telco solutions and our surrounding ecosystem.