Vodafone and Microsoft strike a $1.5 billion agreement for cloud, IoT, and AI

In order to provide generative AI, digital, enterprise, and cloud services to over 300 million organisations and consumers throughout its European and African regions, Vodafone and Microsoft have reached a 10-year cooperation agreement.

The British corporation said that it will replace physical data centres with more affordable and scalable Azure cloud services, as well as spend $1.5 billion in customer-focused AI created with Microsoft's Azure OpenAI and Copilot technologies.

In turn, Microsoft will support the expansion of Vodafone's mobile finance platform in Africa and transform into an equity investor in the managed Internet of Things (IoT) platform when it is spun off as a separate company by April 2024.

According to Luka Mucic, Chief Financial Officer of Vodafone, Microsoft's leadership in artificial intelligence, supported by its collaboration with OpenAI, will revolutionise the telco's consumer services.

Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer of Microsoft, stated that Vodafone's IoT and financial services capabilities were strategically significant.

"The IoT assets are critical in helping us address the sustainability needs of so many of our customers in hard-to-abate sectors," he stated.

Microsoft uses "digital twins" to simulate industrial settings so that cloud-based testing of process enhancements is possible.

"Vodafone's IoT stack allows us to go into those environments, model the environment, create large-scale data stores, and use AI to help customers meet their sustainability goals," he stated.

Building digital literacy was one of Microsoft's regional goals, and Vodafone's M-PESA mobile money platform—which runs in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and other African countries—shared this goal.

(Sources: investing.com, reuters.com)