Confessions of a Telco Executive: We’re Not Invited to the AI Party, Time to Crash It
sebastianbarros.substack.com
Sept. 15, 2025, 3:20 p.m.
The numbers don’t lie. The global AI value chain is expected to expand from $280 billion in 2024 to over $1.6 trillion by 2030. Chips, power, data centers, platforms, models, applications, it’s the most significant technology shift in three decades. And telcos? Even in the best-case scenario, we capture only 1–2% of that pool, approximately $30 to $45 billion per year. At the same time, we’ll spend more than that, roughly $50 billion annually, buying GPUs, cloud services, applications, and AI software. We are not invited to the party. We are paying for it.