Monday Roundup: Altice, Telenor, GTT, Applied Digital, Nokia

As much of the US digs out of the snow, here are 2 bits of M&A news, and three expansion projects from around the world:

The merger talk around Altice Group is back in the news. Late last week, France’s other three major telecommunications groups — Orange, Bouygues Telecom, and Free-iliad Group — confirmed they are again in talks to acquire the company. The same three made a €17B bid before the winter came on, but were turned down. But that didn’t end the chase, it just went behind closed doors. Such a deal would take France from 4 to 3 mobile networks.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian incumbent Telenor says it has signed an agreement to sell its stake in the Thai operator True Corporation. Arise Digital Technology Group, which is owned by Khun Suphachai Chearavanont. The deal covers Telenor’s 24.95% stake as well as a mutual put/call option for the other 5.35% two years from now. TRUE first invested in TAC back in 2000, which merged with True a few years ago. The first part of the deal will net some $3.2B for Telenor, if my math is correct.

GTT is expanding its voice footprint in the APAC region. The global network operator has extended its SIP Trunking infrastructure into Japan. From there they will look to meet the needs of global enterprises for SIP-based voice capabilities in Japan. GTT’s SIP Trunking is embedded within its Envision platform.

Applied Digital has broken ground on yet another gigantic AI factory. Delta Forge 1 will initially support 430MW of total utility power across two buildings, enabling two 150MW facilities on 500 acres. Operations are expected to begin in mid 2027. Where, you ask? The announcement just says it will be in unnamed ‘southern US state’, something we’ll have to get more specifics on sooner or later.

And Nokia has teamed up with Hypertec Group to power deployment of an advanced supercomputing cluster in Canada called Nibi. The project is at the University of Waterloo and will be powered by Nokia’s latest AI-HPC data center networking technology. The infrastructure will be integrated into SHARCNET, which connects 19 academic institutions around Canada.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · VoIP · Wireless