LightOn Powers Next-Generation Telco AI with GSMA and Khalifa University

As part of this strategic collaboration, LightOn hosts the TelecomGPT model and provides the User Interface, enabling industry-wide access to specialized AI capabilities designed specifically for telecom applications. Our GPU infrastructure orchestrated the training of the Open Telco Knowledge Graph focused on 3GPP documentation, which will be made available to the broader community on HuggingFace.

This partnership demonstrates LightOn's commitment to delivering cutting-edge technology for critical industries. By combining our proven expertise in sovereign AI solutions with advanced compute capabilities, we're helping address the significant performance gap that general-purpose LLMs face when tackling telecom-specific challenges, from network troubleshooting to standards interpretation.

Together, we're accelerating the industry's journey toward reliable, domain-specific AI that truly understands telecommunications.

Read the full press release

25 November 2025, MWC Doha: The GSMA Foundry, the GSMA’s innovation hub, and The Khalifa University of Science and Technology, a top-ranked higher education institution in the UAE, today announced a strategic cooperation agreement on the opening day of MWC Doha. The new collaboration aims to advance research and innovation in telco AI through a shared commitment to knowledge exchange and digital transformation.  

Khalifa University will collaborate with GSMA Foundry to develop specialised AI data assets, models and benchmarking frameworks for telecom applications, supporting the development of open robust, safe and energy-efficient solutions for the industry.  

In the first phase of this groundbreaking collaboration, the GSMA and Khalifa University will release key Open Telco assets including TelecomGPT, an advanced, telco-first AI large language model (LLM), with a chat interface hosted on LightOn, and an Open Telco Knowledge Graph focused on 3GPP documentation, built using LightOn compute and hosted on Hugging Face. These assets are designed to accelerate the adoption of accurate, telecom-specific AI models across the industry.

The GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks show that even advanced general purpose LLMs struggle with telecom-specific challenges when interpreting standards, network troubleshooting and handling technical telecom knowledge. Together with Khalifa University’s  6G Research Centre (6GRC) the GSMA is committed to reducing this gap through improving model performance in telecoms to support the mobile ecosystem.  

Professor Bayan Sharif, Provost, Khalifa University, said: “We are pleased to enter into this collaboration with GSMA, the global organisation responsible for the mobile ecosystem and offer our expertise in AI for further advancing innovations in the telecom industry. Our 6G Research Center has a successful track record in contributing to local and international telecom projects, and it is fully equipped with its infrastructure and expertise to help develop AI solutions in collaboration with GSMA. We believe the synergy resulting from combining of resources will lead to telecom-specific AI solutions that will address critical limitations in current AI models.”

“We are excited to embark on this forward-thinking collaboration with GSMA, which marks a major step toward shaping the future of AI in telecommunications. By uniting Khalifa University’s research strength with GSMA’s industry leadership, we are poised to set new benchmarks in AI model reliability and innovation,” said Professor Merouane Debbah, Director, 6G Research Center, Khalifa University. “Together, we aim to empower the region’s digital transformation, accelerate scientific progress and ensure that telecom AI solutions are robust, trustworthy and ready for tomorrow’s challenges.”

“Thanks to our collaboration with Khalifa University, the mobile ecosystem stands to benefit from AI capabilities specifically designed for telecommunications, addressing critical areas such as managing network faults and supporting operational decision-making,” commented Alex Sinclair, CTO, GSMA. “This initiative is a testament to our commitment to safe and dependable solutions that help the industry advance toward fully AI-driven network operations.”

“Supported by Khalifa University, the GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks community has gone from strength to strength and is now starting to define the next generation of models for the telco industry,” commented Louis Powell, Director of AI Technologies, GSMA. “By collaborating with the team at Khalifa University, we have created a collaborative ecosystem that is already accelerating innovation to ensure that AI solutions are fit for purpose in real-world networks.”

The GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks initiative was launched at MWC25 Barcelona and has grown into a collaborative platform for leading mobile network operators to experiment with and validate LLMs tailored to telecom applications. The community also features a leaderboard that highlights how various LLMs perform on telecom-specific use cases. The next phase of community will see it broaden its scope to include holistic evaluation – such as energy efficiency, Time to First Token and task latency – and to assess both agents and models.  

About GSMA
The GSMA is a global organisation unifying the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver innovation foundational to positive business environments and societal change. Our vision is to unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry, and society thrive. Representing mobile operators and organisations across the mobile ecosystem and adjacent industries, the GSMA delivers for its members across three broad pillars: Connectivity for Good, Industry Services and Solutions, and Outreach. This activity includes advancing policy, tackling today’s biggest societal challenges, underpinning the technology and interoperability that make mobile work, and providing the world’s largest platform to convene the mobile ecosystem at the MWC and M360 series of events.
We invite you to find out more at gsma.com  

About Khalifa University of Science and Technology
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, the UAE’s top-ranked research-intensive institution, focuses on developing world leaders and critical thinkers in science, engineering and health science. The world-class University endeavors to be a catalyst to the growth of Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s rapidly developing knowledge economy as an education destination of choice and a global leader among widely acknowledged international universities.  
For more information, please visit: http://www.ku.ac.ae/