OpenAI has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom, one of Europe's largest telecommunications operators: Starting from 2026, the latter will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across the entire company, and jointly develop AI solutions for network operations, customer service, and employee assistants.
Key Collaboration Points
- Deployment Scale: About 200,000 employees at Deutsche Telekom will use ChatGPT Enterprise in phases, covering core processes such as customer service, IT operations, finance, and human resources.
- Technology Implementation: The two parties plan to host dedicated computing clusters in local data centers in Germany, ensuring data remains within the EU and meeting GDPR compliance requirements.
- Joint Innovation: In addition to the "out-of-the-box" Enterprise version, both companies will co-develop a "Telecom Industry Model" — using Deutsche Telekom's global network logs, fault tickets, and customer service recordings to train a specialized large model, used for fault prediction, base station configuration optimization, and knowledge-based Q&A for frontline employees.
Business Model
- B2B Replication: Deutsche Telekom will resell the "hosted version of ChatGPT" to European enterprise customers, combined with dedicated lines, edge computing, and 5G slices, forming an "network + AI" bundled solution.
- Revenue Sharing: OpenAI retains the model licensing fees, while Deutsche Telekom collects hosting and integration service fees, targeting an additional €1 billion in AI revenue by 2027.
Strategic Background
- User Base: Germany is the European market with the most paying users for ChatGPT, and also one of the top three commercial customer sources for OpenAI globally.
- Computing Infrastructure: The 1 billion euro "Industrial AI Cloud" between Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA will go live in Q1 2026, providing a GPU/network/security integrated foundation for this collaboration.
- Regulatory Friendly: Local data centers + European data staying within the EU clear compliance obstacles for EU companies purchasing generative AI.
Next Steps
In H2 2025, the two parties will launch the "Telecom Industry Model" Beta, with initial pilot trials for German and Austrian enterprise customers; in Q1 2026, along with the Industrial AI Cloud, it will officially go commercial, planning to replicate the hosted model to neighboring EU countries such as France and Italy. AIbase will continue to track the performance of the industry large model, pricing details, and compliance certification progress.
