Telenor AI Factory, built on Red Hat OpenShift AI, addresses data residency demands while powering large-scale AI model training and inference
MWC Barcelona – March 2, 2026 — Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Telenor has chosen Red Hat’s cloud-native and AI platforms to power its sovereign AI factory, powered by NVIDIA. This latest Telenor AI Factory offering provides high performance hardware and innovative AI models while maintaining national control over data and processes. With this collaboration, Red Hat and Telenor AI Factory intend to make it faster and easier for organizations to realize AI business value by smoothing the flow from AI blueprints to actual production.
We are building Telenor AI Factory for flexibility and portability, no lock-in, and Red Hat is a key part of this with its open software and principles
Kaaren Hilsen
CEO, Telenor AI Factory
Addressing the sovereign AI opportunity
As the demand for AI grows, Telenor is tapping its decades of experience in operating critical infrastructure to help meet the stringent national and EU requirements around data controls and digital resilience. Telenor AI Factory provides a highly scalable, security-focused infrastructure optimized for AI and other compute-intensive tasks able to process sensitive data in-region. Its architecture of GPUs, low-latency networking and high-performance storage is based on NVIDIA’s reference architecture.
Accelerate time to value with a cloud-native foundation
Telenor AI Factory selected Red Hat OpenShift AI as the core environment for building, training and deploying AI-based agents and applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows with LlamaStack. Red Hat Consulting supported Telenor AI Factory in designing and implementing an architecture capable of delivering AI services to external companies, from resource provisioning to multi-tenancy to data sovereignty. OpenShift AI pairs with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to form the common cloud-native foundation for Telenor AI Factory, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automates the creation, management and scalability of operations.
Scaling AI through freedom of choice and operational consistency
Red Hat’s support for any model, on any hardware, across any environment gives Telenor AI Factory and its customers extensive flexibility to deploy applications and workloads with their preferred tools, libraries and hardware, fulfilling many of the demands for sovereign AI. This choice and control also enables Telenor AI Factory and its customers to optimize performance by improving GPU utilization and potential profitability for demanding AI workloads.
Additionally, Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support for European Union offers dedicated technical support from within the EU, providing new levels of operational sovereignty when it comes to supporting critical operations. Red Hat’s commitment to delivering enhanced security capabilities on day one as well as its trusted software supply chain approach supports Telenor AI Factory’s ability to handle sensitive workloads.
By standardizing on Red Hat technologies, Telenor AI Factory and its customers gain a vendor-neutral foundational layer of technology that abstracts away hardware complexity and eases portability. This provides sovereignty across the spectrum of enterprise IT, starting with the transparency and auditability of open source. As the crux of Red Hat’s technology stack, open source software delivers freedom of choice, enabling organizations to see the code, verify it and readily understand it.
Red Hat OpenShift AI streamlines AI model lifecycles, bringing together data scientists, AI engineers and app developers on the same platform. This promotes collaboration, operational consistency and production scalability. Telenor AI Factory’s IT teams can manage both traditional applications and AI workloads side-by-side, helping avoid operational silos, reduce costs and improve overall agility.
Telenor’s AI Factory has two sites so far in Norway, running on renewable energy. The Red Hat-based infrastructure hosts several multi-tenant customers, both within the Telenor group and external customers with use cases dealing with sensitive and critical data within the public and private sector.
Supporting Quotes
Rich Stephens, vice president, EMEA Telecommunications, Red Hat
“Telenor AI Factory is leading the way in rolling out sovereign cloud for the enterprise and Red Hat is excited to bring our experience of open innovation and flexible platforms to support delivery of these diverse and complex services. With the pace of change in the AI market, Red Hat and Telenor AI Factory are catering for today’s greatest strategic need: The freedom to choose any model, on any accelerator, across any environment. Together we are delivering support for sovereignty, governance and enhanced systems security so that customers can scale AI efforts to drive value, with control and autonomy over data.”
Kaaren Hilsen, CEO, Telenor AI Factory
“Telenor is focused on delivering dependable technologies for organizations looking to enhance operational resilience and drive AI-powered innovation. Telenor AI Factory and Red Hat collaborate as one team – we get in rooms together to jointly problem-solve and push forward. We are building Telenor AI Factory for flexibility and portability, no lock-in, and Red Hat is a key part of this with its open software and principles. With Red Hat as the common cloud layer, Telenor AI Factory provides purpose-built, security-focused environments that reduce deployment complexity while optimizing costs so that our customers can build on what already works and own what they create. Red Hat and Telenor AI Factory are transforming isolated GPU silos into a flexible and compliant offering ready for the demands of the Nordic and wider European market.”
