Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, has entered the cloud services arena with the launch of Airtel Cloud, a sovereign, telecom-grade platform designed to reduce cloud costs for Indian enterprises while ensuring data stays within national borders.

The platform, launched through Airtel’s fully owned subsidiary Xtelify, will also be made available to other telecom operators via a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. The offering marks a strategic shift for the Sunil Mittal-led firm as it steps into a domain currently dominated by U.S. heavyweights such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

The launch is backed by a powerful AI software suite aimed at improving customer experience, lowering churn, and increasing average revenue per user (ARPU)—a critical performance metric in the telecom sector.

Among Xtelify’s early wins are contracts with Singtel (Singapore), Airtel Africa (operating in 14 countries), and Globe Telecom in the Philippines. In Singapore, Singtel will deploy the service for its field teams, where it is expected to enhance workflows, improve resource management, and cut carbon emissions.

“Within Airtel, we have been actively harnessing digital innovations at an unmatched scale to transform our services and enhance customer experience… All this is enabled by Airtel Cloud, where all our applications run at a very compelling cost,” says Gopal Vittal, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Bharti Airtel.

Vittal notes that Xtelify’s bundled network and cloud solutions could yield up to 40% savings compared to deploying separate platforms. The platform features four main products—Xtelify Data Engine, Work, IQ, and Serve—offering AI-driven insights, task automation, real-time tracking, and spam and fraud protection.

Significantly, Airtel Cloud is a sovereign platform, with full operational control and data residency within India. It will be hosted on next-gen domestic data centers, further supported by Airtel’s data center arm Nxtra, which is investing ₹6,000 crore over the next 3-4 years to expand its capacity.