Telcos, Hardware Is Sexy Again 
                    
                
                     sebastianbarros.substack.com
                    Nov. 3, 2025, 8:59 a.m.
                
                For more than a decade, the telecom industry has been busy trying to reinvent itself as something it is not. “Techco,” “Servco,” “Digital Operator”, all elegant slogans for an age that believed value came from software and platforms. Telcos sold towers, outsourced data centers, and trimmed engineering ranks to chase cloud partnerships and brand adjacency. It looked modern; it was strategically backward. While telcos were distancing themselves from hardware, the world quietly re-industrialized. AI transformed computing from a software abstraction into a physical process, a factory operation that consumes electricity, produces tokens, and generates cognition. The bottleneck is no longer spectrum or subscriber growth but the energy-to-intelligence ratio: how many joules it takes to deliver a decision. Every major technology company is now an energy company in disguise. Global CapEx tells the story.