AI is reshaping telco. At NVIDIA’s GTC conference, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, and Spectrum announced they’re building AI grids, turning millions of existing cell sites and central offices into distributed AI compute infrastructure. NVIDIA's survey of 1,000 telco professionals found more than 90% reporting that AI is already delivering cost savings or revenue growth, with the biggest ROI coming from agentic AI for autonomous networks.

For this episode, I’m joined by Kanika Atri, Senior Director of Telecoms at NVIDIA. We dig into where real AI ROI lives in telco, why the network may be the world’s most underutilized compute asset, and the big unanswered question: who’s going to build the software that makes all of this work?

Listen now to hear:

How NVIDIA’s survey reveals where AI is already paying off [03:06];
Why telcos’ existing infrastructure could become the backbone of distributed AI [05:06];
The critical software gap nobody in the industry owns [11:19]; and
Why countries are turning to operators, not hyperscalers, to build their national AI [12:27].

Links and Resources:

Read NVIDIA’s State of AI in Telecommunications report, a survey of 1,000+ telecom professionals that covers where AI is delivering value, what’s driving investment, and how operators are planning for distributed AI computing and 6G.
Check out these blogs by Kanika Atri:
- NVIDIA, Telecom Leaders Build AI Grids to Optimize Inference on Distributed Networks
- Telcos Across Five Continents Are Building NVIDIA-Powered Sovereign AI Infrastructure
Read more about SoftBank’s AI-RAN breakthrough in Japan and Indosat’s full sovereign AI stack in Indonesia, including locally developed LLMs and 20+ AI applications.
NVIDIA made a $1 billion equity investment in Nokia to build CUDA-accelerated 5G software that runs on any platform. Watch NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Nokia CEO Justin Hotard explain the partnership in this interview.
Learn more about the Totogi Ontology and how it’s helping Tier-1 operators turn AI into actual profit.
Read the Appledore Research report on Totogi, Telecom-specific Ontology, the key to AI-native telco. It explains why context, not data, is the foundation AI agents need to work at scale (paywalled).
Kanika climbed cell towers early in her career. Maybe her amygdala doesn’t fire like most people’s—just like legendary free-solo climber Alex Honnold’s brain scans show little fear response to heights. He’s famous for scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope (documented in the Oscar-winning film Free Solo), and most recently the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taiwan. Watch the news coverage here.
Check out this episode on our YouTube channel.
You can find the episode transcript here.

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This week’s guest:
Kanika Atri is senior director of telecom products and marketing at NVIDIA, driving AI adoption across the telecom ecosystem. She works closely with hundreds of customers, developers, and partners to embed AI into networks, operations, and services—accelerating the shift to AI‑native wireless networks, autonomous agentic-AI-powered operations, sovereign AI factories, and 6G‑ready infrastructure. Through these engagements, she shapes product roadmaps, go‑to‑market strategies, and commercial partnerships that translate advanced AI capabilities into measurable business impact for the telecom industry.

Podcast Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios, TelcoDR
Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
Senior Editor/Brand Manager: Alisa Jenkins, Springboard Marketing
Audio Editor: Andrew Condell
Supervising Producer: Amanda Avery
Associate Producer: Kriselda Dionisio
Music: Dyami Wilson

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Ep 139 - Can telco build an AI grid? (NVIDIA’s Kanika Atri)