Red Hat is steering a comprehensive, AI-driven transformation for telecommunications by expanding its telco partner ecosystem, embedding artificial intelligence into network infrastructure, and aligning closely with major operators and hardware providers. At MWC Barcelona 2025, Red Hat highlighted a strategic push to weave AI capabilities across telco platforms, from energy optimisation in core networks to virtualised radio access networks, all underpinned by Red Hat OpenShift and a broad open source ethos. The company underscored its intent to broaden collaboration with a growing roster of partners, including SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange, as it moves telcos toward cloud-native architectures and more intelligent, resilient networks. Hanen Garcia, Global Telco Solutions Manager at Red Hat, framed the initiative as a deliberate expansion of an ecosystem built to tackle the converging demands of AI, edge computing, and scalable network management. He emphasized that the evolution of their telco partnerships reflects a broader industry shift toward more integrated, AI-enabled platforms that can address both current and forthcoming network challenges.
Red Hat at MWC Barcelona 2025: An Ecosystem-Centric AI Strategy for Telcos
Red Hat’s presence at MWC Barcelona 2025 was anchored in a clear, forward-looking ecosystem strategy designed to accelerate AI adoption across telecommunications networks. The company presented a roadmap that places partnerships at the heart of its enterprise strategy, arguing that collaboration with a diverse set of players—from semiconductor makers to network function vendors and system integrators—provides the breadth and depth needed to support AI-enabled, cloud-native telco operations. Garcia highlighted that since Red Hat began working with telcos, the value of a robust ecosystem has become increasingly evident. He noted that the company has expanded the ecosystem over the past year by bringing in critical partners whose expertise complements Red Hat’s platform capabilities. This approach aims to ensure that telcos can access a comprehensive set of tools, accelerators, and services that address the full spectrum of AI workloads, from energy efficiency to real-time network analytics.
A central theme in Red Hat’s dialogue at the event was the AI-driven transformation of network infrastructure. The company described how AI is no longer a supplementary capability but a central pillar in the design, deployment, and operation of modern telecom networks. By embedding AI into the platform, Red Hat aims to deliver consistent management experiences, faster deployment cycles, and smarter, more adaptive networks. The interview with Hanen Garcia underscored the importance of governance, interoperability, and ecosystem alignment for achieving these outcomes. He explained that the focus is not only on introducing AI capabilities but on ensuring that the AI functions harmonise with customers’ existing processes and the broader vendor ecosystem. The goal, he said, is to bring the right mix of capabilities to customers—covering AI-powered analytics, automation, and orchestration—while preserving the flexibility that telcos require to respond to evolving technology and market demands.
To illustrate the breadth of its partnerships, Red Hat outlined several headline collaborations announced at MWC. SoftBank is pursuing AI-driven power optimisation solutions to improve energy efficiency across telecommunications networks. Fujitsu’s work centers on delivering virtualised radio access network (vRAN) solutions on Red Hat OpenShift, with AI baked into network management. Rakuten Mobile is focusing on enhancing Open RAN solutions and cloud-native infrastructure, while KDDI aims to minimise downtime and accelerate software deployment through Open RAN innovations. Orange is driving a rapid telco cloud transformation, reinforcing Red Hat’s commitment to cloud-native principles and AI-enabled operations across multiple geographies and network topologies. In addition to these customer-focused collaborations, the partnerships demonstrate Red Hat’s intent to create an integrated, AI-enabled telco platform that integrates hardware and software across the network stack.
Hanen Garcia’s comments reveal a broader strategic shift: the telco ecosystem is evolving rapidly, and Red Hat’s role is to be a facilitator and integrator that brings together specialized partners to address the entire lifecycle of AI-enabled networks. He stressed that the firm’s approach is not about replacing existing partnerships but about expanding and strengthening the ecosystem to provide telcos with deeper capabilities and more choices. The emphasis is on bringing the “right size and the right mix” of capabilities—covering the cloud platform, hardware integration, and collaborative development with hardware and network equipment vendors—to ensure telcos can address the spectrum of challenges they face today and anticipate future demands.
Within this ecosystem-centric framework, Red Hat is positioning itself as a collaborator that enables customers to leverage AI in practical, value-driven ways. The company’s strategy is to embed AI capabilities into core network functions, thereby enhancing performance, reliability, and efficiency. This includes areas such as AI-driven power management, predictive maintenance, and AI-based orchestration that can accelerate service delivery and reduce the time to market for new telco services. By strengthening ties with key players across the value chain, Red Hat intends to create a more cohesive and scalable platform that telcos can rely upon as they migrate from traditional network architectures to cloud-native, AI-enhanced infrastructures.
AI-Driven Power Optimisation and vRAN on Red Hat OpenShift: Concrete Use Cases and Collaborations
A cornerstone of Red Hat’s MWC narrative is the practical implementation of AI within the telecom network through targeted use cases. The SoftBank collaboration, focused on AI-driven power optimisation solutions, exemplifies how machine learning can be harnessed to improve energy efficiency in complex telecom networks. This initiative is not merely theoretical; it is framed as a concrete deployment path that addresses one of the most pressing cost and sustainability challenges in modern networks. AI-driven power optimisation involves collecting diverse data from network elements, analyzing consumption patterns, and dynamically adjusting power usage to reduce waste and emissions while preserving performance and reliability. The emphasis on this use case signals Red Hat’s commitment to applying AI in ways that deliver tangible, measurable benefits for operators and end users alike.
In parallel, Red Hat is extending its vRAN efforts with Fujitsu to provide virtualised radio access network solutions on Red Hat OpenShift. This collaboration elevates AI-enabled management of radio resources, enabling operators to orchestrate and optimise radio access networks with greater agility and visibility. The partnership also involves other major players such as Ericsson and Nokia, which are referenced as part of the broader ecosystem that supports telco network transformation. The coalescing of these alliances suggests a comprehensive approach to modernising the RAN landscape, with AI-driven decision-making and automated management playing central roles. The vRAN initiative is positioned as a practical, scalable pathway to transform telco networks, leveraging Red Hat’s OpenShift platform to host virtualized network functions and to streamline deployment, management, and updates.
Hanen Garcia repeatedly emphasised that the telco ecosystem is in continuous evolution, with a constant push to bring additional partners into the fold to address emerging challenges and opportunities. He indicated that the ecosystem’s growth is not only about expanding the number of participants but also about ensuring that the participants collectively provide end-to-end capabilities. The aim is to ensure customers have access to a complete solution—from AI-enabled analytics and autonomous management to robust hardware and software integration—that can help them navigate the complexities of next-generation networks. The emphasis on collaboration with multiple partners reflects a recognition that AI-enabled telcos require a diverse and complementary set of competencies, spanning software platforms, hardware acceleration, network function virtualization, open standards, and cloud-native architecture.
Key partnerships announced at MWC highlighted by Red Hat include SoftBank’s focus on AI-powered energy efficiency, Fujitsu’s vRAN on OpenShift, Rakuten Mobile’s Open RAN and cloud-native infrastructure enhancements, KDDI’s Open RAN-driven minimisation of downtime and faster software deployment, and Orange’s telco cloud transformation acceleration. Each of these partnerships reflects a distinct emphasis within the broader AI-enabled telco strategy, yet all converge on the objective of delivering more intelligent, resilient, and scalable networks. The common thread across these collaborations is the integration of AI capabilities into the core platform, enabling more proactive operations, smarter decision-making, and accelerated innovation across the network stack.
Red Hat’s overarching strategy is to construct an ecosystem of specialized partners capable of addressing the computational requirements of AI-enhanced telecommunications networks. This involves a broad spectrum of contributors—from semiconductor manufacturers to network function vendors—whose combined expertise supports the platform’s ability to run AI workloads efficiently and securely. The collaboration with hardware partners is particularly notable, as it underscores the need for optimized acceleration for AI tasks such as inference and training in telecommunications contexts. Intel, Arm, and Nvidia are cited as key players in this hardware partnership tranche, reflecting a recognition that advanced processor technologies are essential to delivering the performance and efficiency that AI-powered telcos require. By aligning with these hardware leaders, Red Hat is aiming to ensure that telcos have access to cutting-edge accelerators and optimized software stacks, enabling scalable AI deployment across central offices, edge sites, and distributed RAN environments.
Looking forward, Red Hat’s messages at MWC placed a strong emphasis on cloud-native progression and the telco transition from NFV to cloud-native architectures. The company is positioning itself as a catalyst that helps telcos move beyond the limitations of traditional virtual network functions toward the more flexible, scalable, and resilient cloud-native model. Hanen Garcia provided insight into this evolution, noting that there has been a devolution from virtualisation toward cloud-native platforms. He stressed that Red Hat has long collaborated with customers and the ecosystem since the early days of network virtualisation and now sees a natural progression toward cloud-native platforms. This perspective aligns with the industry-wide shift toward Kubernetes-based orchestration, containerized network functions, and open-source tooling designed to support scalable, automated, AI-enabled networks.
Garcia also highlighted examples of telcos that have begun adopting the Red Hat platform as part of their evolution toward more advanced network architectures. He pointed to KDDI and T-Mobile as operators that have selected Red Hat’s platform for network evolution, reinforcing the company’s position as a trusted enabler of cloud-native telco transformation. The emphasis on the right mix of capabilities—spanning cloud infrastructure, platform support, and hardware integration—reflects Red Hat’s commitment to delivering an integrated solution that can handle the full range of current and future needs. This approach also signals a willingness to collaborate with hardware partners to ensure that telcos can achieve seamless interoperability across the stack, from OpenShift deployments to AI-enabled network management and automation.
The Path to AI-Enabled Telcos: Platform, Partnerships, and Open Innovation
A core element of Red Hat’s MWC narrative is the ongoing expansion of its platform to accommodate AI-enabled network functions and to support the telco of the future. The company is increasingly focusing on introducing AI capabilities into the platform itself, with the aim of delivering consistent orchestration, easier management, and unified experiences for operators. The emphasis on AI within the platform reflects a broader industry trend toward embedding intelligence at every layer of the network, from the data plane to management planes, and across both core and edge deployments. Red Hat asserts that this AI-enabled platform can bring consistency to network management, ensuring customers have a stable foundation upon which to build innovative services and automated workflows.
At the heart of this AI strategy is the belief that telcos will benefit from a unified platform that can serve multiple use cases, including AI-powered analytics, platform lifecycle management, and intelligent network operations. By integrating AI into the platform, Red Hat aims to provide operators with the tools they need to reduce operational complexity, accelerate service delivery, and improve network performance. The company’s demonstrations at MWC showcased how AI can help manage the lifecycle of the platform itself, particularly in terms of lifecycle management and network operations optimization. García emphasized that the demonstrations illustrated how customers can leverage AI to improve their networks while also benefiting from a more streamlined platform management experience.
The MWC demos also highlighted how Red Hat is strengthening its ecosystem by enabling customers to leverage the combined capabilities of its partners. The demonstrations focused on lifecycle management and network operations enhancements, showing how AI can be employed to optimise the platform’s lifecycle—from deployment and updates to monitoring and optimization. The overarching message was that AI is not an isolated capability but a pervasive enabling technology that can drive improvements across platform management, network performance, and service delivery. This approach aligns with Red Hat’s broader strategy to provide telcos with an end-to-end AI-enabled platform that supports both current needs and the innovations anticipated in the coming years.
In addition to technology demonstrations, Red Hat used MWC Barcelona 2025 as a platform to engage with customers and partners on the ongoing evolution of telco networks toward AI-enabled, cloud-native architectures. Garcia indicated that there is a strong appetite among telcos for platforms that can consolidate AI capabilities with cloud-native tooling, open source collaboration, and a robust ecosystem of partners. He noted that Red Hat’s relationship with customers is built on a shared commitment to innovation, interoperability, and open standards, which together underpin a trusted approach to deploying AI at scale in telecommunications environments.
Open source remains a foundational element of Red Hat’s strategy. The company emphasises its engagement with open source communities as a means to drive innovation and accelerate the adoption of AI-enhanced capabilities across telcos. Garcia described an approach that brings together innovation from diverse communities into the platform, ensuring customers can benefit as soon as possible from cutting-edge developments. This open-source collaboration is designed to reinforce interoperability, avoid vendor lock-in, and foster rapid experimentation and deployment of AI-enabled network features. By rooting its AI strategy in open source, Red Hat seeks to ensure that telcos can participate in ongoing innovation while maintaining agility and control over their networks.
In the broader context of telco digital transformation, Red Hat’s platform is intended to support the industry’s shift toward cloud-native 5G and the eventual transition to 5G Advanced. Garcia highlighted that while 5G deployments are already underway, the next wave—5G Advanced—is not far away. Red Hat’s roadmap seeks to equip customers with the capabilities needed to support this next stage of evolution, enabling them to continuously evolve their networks as new standards and requirements emerge. The strategy includes not only cloud-native infrastructure but also the tooling and ecosystem necessary to manage increasingly complex AI workloads at scale, across central offices and distributed edge sites.
Open Platform, AI Integration, and the Telco Ecosystem: A Detailed Look at Partnerships
The collaboration with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange demonstrates Red Hat’s commitment to building an AI-enabled telco platform that spans hardware, software, and services. Each partner contributes unique value to the ecosystem. SoftBank’s focus on AI-driven power optimisation targets the most tangible operational efficiency gains, offering a model for how AI can meaningfully reduce energy costs and environmental impact in large-scale networks. Fujitsu’s vRAN on OpenShift provides a practical path to virtualize radio access networks while embedding AI into network management tasks, a combination that can increase flexibility and reduce deployment times for new radio configurations and optimisations. Rakuten Mobile, by enhancing Open RAN and cloud-native infrastructure, reinforces the goal of a more modular, scalable radio access environment. KDDI’s emphasis on reducing downtime and accelerating software deployments through Open RAN showcases how AI and automation can shorten maintenance windows and improve reliability. Orange’s telco cloud transformation initiative illustrates how cloud-native principles can underpin a modern, agile network architecture while enabling more rapid service innovation.
To support these initiatives, Red Hat has broadened its hardware partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers, including Intel, Arm, and Nvidia. The involvement of these chipset and accelerator leaders is critical for delivering the performance needed to run AI workloads in real time across telco networks. The AI-enabled platform requires robust processing power, low latency, and energy-efficient acceleration to support tasks such as predictive analytics, anomaly detection, automated orchestration, and intelligent resource allocation. By aligning with Intel, Arm, and Nvidia, Red Hat seeks to provide telcos with access to a diverse set of hardware options, enabling optimized configurations for different deployment scenarios, whether at scale in centralized data centers or at the network edge.
Red Hat’s emphasis on cloud-native evolution—moving from NFV toward cloud-native platforms—reflects a broader industry trajectory. The company’s messages reiterate the idea that cloud-native architectures are better suited to handle the demands of AI-enabled networks. The devolution from virtualisation to cloud-native is framed as a natural progression, with telcos requiring more flexible, scalable, and maintainable networks to support evolving workloads and services. The partnership strategy supports this shift by ensuring that the platform can operate across a range of hardware environments and open standards, enabling telcos to adopt AI-based capabilities without being constrained by proprietary stacks. The mention of network evolution with KDDI and T-Mobile reinforces the practical reality that operators are already selecting Red Hat as a key platform for their ongoing transformation journeys.
As the telco industry pivots toward 5G Advanced, Red Hat’s approach emphasizes collaboration with the open source community and alignment with industry open standards. Garcia indicates that the company is actively engaging with open source communities to harness innovation across multiple domains that can be rapidly integrated into the platform. This approach is intended to keep Red Hat at the forefront of telco technology while ensuring customers receive timely access to new capabilities that can be immediately applied to their networks. The emphasis on open source also aligns with an industry-wide trend toward more collaborative development models, which can accelerate the delivery of AI-enabled network features and reduce time-to-value for operators.
Demonstrating AI-Driven Lifecycle Management and Network Operations at MWC Barcelona 2025
Red Hat showcased demonstrations at MWC that focused on platform lifecycle management and enhancements to network operations. These demonstrations illustrated how AI can be used to manage the lifecycle of the platform itself, encompassing deployment, updates, monitoring, and ongoing optimization. The demonstrations emphasize the practical benefits of AI-enabled lifecycle management: reduced manual intervention, faster rollouts of new features, and more predictable maintenance windows. The ability to automate and optimise the lifecycle, guided by AI insights, helps ensure that telcos can maintain high levels of service quality while continuing to evolve their networks in alignment with the latest standards and technologies.
When asked what Hanen Garcia is most excited to showcase, he highlighted the evolution of platform lifecycle management and the role of the partner ecosystem in managing that lifecycle. He explained that the demonstrations reveal how customers can use AI to improve their networks and how Red Hat’s platform, combined with partner contributions, can streamline the management of complex network environments. The focus on lifecycle management reflects a broader trend in which operators seek to reduce operational complexity and accelerate the delivery of new capabilities, including AI-enabled insights and automation, across both core networks and edge deployments.
In addition to lifecycle management, the demonstrations at MWC highlighted how AI can be leveraged to optimize network operations more broadly. This includes smarter fault detection, predictive maintenance, and proactive capacity planning, all of which contribute to reduced downtime, improved service availability, and better customer experiences. By integrating AI with network management tools and processes, telcos can gain deeper visibility into network performance, enabling more precise and timely interventions that prevent incidents before they impact customers. The demonstrations underscored Red Hat’s belief that AI will play a central role in how operators run their networks in a modern, cloud-native environment.
Red Hat’s presence and demonstrations at MWC Barcelona 2025 also highlighted broader strategic themes: the company’s commitment to open collaboration, the centrality of AI in telco platforms, and the critical role of partnerships in delivering end-to-end AI-enabled telecom solutions. The demonstrations served as a tangible demonstration of how the platform, in concert with partner solutions, can deliver value across the network lifecycle—from initial deployment to ongoing optimization and evolution.
The Open Source Pillar, Hardware Partnerships, and the Next Phase of Telco Transformation
A core thread in Red Hat’s MWC narrative is the role of open source and the collaboration across the ecosystem to accelerate telco transformation. The company frames open source as a driver of innovation, interoperability, and rapid progress. By drawing on contributions from multiple open source communities, Red Hat envisions a platform that can rapidly incorporate new AI capabilities and network management techniques, ensuring that telcos can stay ahead of the curve. The philosophy is to bring together innovation from across communities into the platform in a way that remains accessible to operators, avoids vendor lock-in, and sustains a steady cadence of improvements and updates.
The emphasis on hardware partnerships signals Red Hat’s recognition that AI workloads require specialized processing capabilities. Intel, Arm, and Nvidia are central to the AI acceleration story, offering a spectrum of accelerators and optimization options that can be tailored to different network deployments. This collaboration with hardware leaders is essential to delivering the performance and efficiency demanded by AI-enabled telcos. It also enables telcos to implement AI workloads across the network stack, from data center environments to edge locations, without compromising security, manageability, or reliability. By partnering with these hardware innovators, Red Hat aims to provide telcos with robust, scalable, and future-proof platforms capable of supporting continued AI-driven transformation.
The broader objective is to ensure that telcos can move fluidly from NFV toward cloud-native platforms while harnessing AI to automate operations, optimise resource allocation, and enable rapid service innovation. Garcia’s remarks reflect an ambition to maintain momentum in this transition by leveraging the open source community and the ecosystem to bring forward practical AI-enabled capabilities that can be deployed at scale. The message to operators is clear: adopt a platform that can evolve with the industry, integrate with the hardware and software you already rely on, and deliver AI-powered improvements that translate into tangible business and service benefits.
Toward a Cloud-Native Telco Future: 5G Advanced, Open Platforms, and Customer-Centric Outcomes
Red Hat’s MWC narrative ties AI to the long-term evolution of telcos toward cloud-native architectures and 5G Advanced. The company positions itself as a partner that can ease the transition from legacy or semi-virtualised environments to fully cloud-native telcos, while ensuring that AI is embedded in the platform to drive efficiencies and capabilities across all layers of the network. The emphasis on 5G Advanced signals a readiness to support operators as the standards and capabilities mature, enabling more sophisticated use cases and enhanced performance. Red Hat’s open-source approach is presented as a means to accelerate this evolution, allowing telcos to leverage community-driven innovations and to integrate new features into their networks more rapidly and with greater transparency.
Red Hat’s strategy also includes careful attention to the management and orchestration of AI-enabled networks. The demonstrations at MWC56 illustrated how platform lifecycle management can be enhanced with AI to provide better maintenance planning, more accurate deployment timelines, and improved orchestration across distributed sites. The company’s collaboration with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange underscores a commitment to delivering end-to-end AI-enabled telco solutions, spanning energy management, vRAN, Open RAN, cloud-native transformation, and beyond. Garcia emphasized the importance of a deliberate, ongoing collaboration with partners to ensure that telcos receive a consistent, coherent, and integrated set of capabilities across the entire network stack.
In closing, Red Hat’s MWC Barcelona 2025 messaging reflects a robust, multi-faceted strategy designed to accelerate AI adoption in telecommunications. By expanding its partner ecosystem, embedding AI into core platform capabilities, and fostering open-source collaboration, Red Hat aims to deliver a credible path for telcos seeking to transition to cloud-native, AI-enhanced networks. The company’s emphasis on lifecycle management, network operations optimization, and the alignment of hardware and software stakeholders indicates a practical, results-focused approach to telco transformation. As 5G Advanced and future network paradigms come into sharper focus, Red Hat’s strategy positions the company as a central enabler of AI-enabled telco platforms that prioritise reliability, scalability, and innovation.
Conclusion
Red Hat’s strategy at MWC Barcelona 2025 demonstrates a concerted push to transform telcos through AI-infused platforms, expanded partnerships, and a robust open-source framework. The company’s collaborations—with SoftBank, Fujitsu, Rakuten Mobile, KDDI, and Orange—signal a deliberate effort to embed AI into tangible network improvements, from energy efficiency to vRAN management. The alliance with hardware leaders like Intel, Arm, and Nvidia provides the necessary acceleration and performance for AI workloads, while the commitment to cloud-native architectures and NFV-to-cloud-native evolution positions Red Hat as a key driver of telco modernization. Demonstrations focused on platform lifecycle management and network operations illustrate the practical value AI can deliver in real-world telco environments. By embracing an ecosystem-centric approach, Red Hat aims to deliver a comprehensive, AI-enabled platform that can adapt to evolving standards, expand through open-source collaboration, and support telcos as they navigate the ongoing shift toward 5G Advanced and beyond. The result is a compelling vision of smarter, more efficient, and highly adaptable telecommunications networks, built on a foundation of open collaboration, robust partnerships, and the scalable power of AI.
