Operators must decide whether to expand into data centres as the infrastructure value chain transforms

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, was centre stage at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January 2026. The man whose company, in October 2025, became the first to achieve a USD5 trillion valuation, claimed that AI was driving “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history.” He sketched out a “five-layer cake” that includes energy, chips and compute, cloud data centres, AI models and applications.

There is no explicit mention of connectivity or communications in this image of the AI infrastructure landscape. This seems symbolic of the risk that AI poses to telecoms operators that are heavily invested in infrastructure assets – that they will be sidelined in the value chain, providing essential connectivity but relegated to the ‘dumb pipe’ role that many have dreaded since the emergence of the internet. 

This article discusses why telecoms operators must decide whether they can play a role in data centre ownership, and how to leverage their networks within a broad communications fabric.