BARCELONA — Global telecommunications firms are talking up advances in key technologies like artificial intelligence as they look to transition away from being perceived as the “dumb pipes” behind the internet.

At the Mobile World Congress technology conference in Barcelona, CEOs of multiple telecoms companies described how they’re piling money into new technological innovations, including AI, next-generation 5G and 6G networks, satellite internet and even smart cities.

Makoto Takahashi, president and CEO of Japanese telecom giant KDDI, detailed plans to build a smart city dubbed Takanawa Gateway City in Tokyo, as well as roll out direct-to-cell satellite internet connectivity in partnership with Elon Musk’s Starlink venture.

Ralph Mupita, the CEO of Africa’s largest mobile network operator MTN, also took to the stage to share how the company has made significant strides toward becoming a company that offers both wireless connectivity and fintech services such as payments, e-commerce, insurance, lending and remittances.

“The telco business has served us well. It has iterated since. But the future is really about the future of platforms,” Mupita said in his keynote talk, adding the company has invested aggressively into other areas such as media streaming and financial services.

For two decades, tech giants such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix have flourished in a world where content can be delivered directly to people’s devices, consumers can communicate seamlessly with one another, and data can be stored or streamed online without having to own cumbersome infrastructure — all thanks to innovations like the internet, smartphones and the cloud.

However, these innovations have disrupted telecom firms’ business models, to the point where they’re now often perceived as legacy players that are only there to lay down the cables and other network infrastructure that enable internet connectivity.

It’s a dilemma that’s earned telco brands the pejorative term “dumb pipes.”

“I remember early in the industry, even before mobile internet when SMS used to be the killer app,” Hatem Dowidar, CEO of UAE state-owned telecom company e&, said in a keynote speech at MWC. “We used to make messaging revenue. We used to make voice revenue.”

“All this over the years got disrupted by over-the-top players, to the point that today, a lot of telcos around the world are reduced to being a pipe of packets just getting data across the networks,” Dowidar added. “And competition is not staying still. They have the scale, they have the investment to go and disrupt even further.”

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal that the South Korean telecoms giant has looked to AI technology to help it improve the efficiency of its wireless network — something that was consistently on display at numerous telco operators’ booths at MWC.

“For telcos, there are two aspects of AI. One is as a user, the other is as a supplier,” said Young-sang. “As a user, you are a telco business, you can improve your network efficiency, marketing and customer service by using the AI technology. You can improve your own operations.”

“The other aspect is, AI can be a growth engine, a new business opportunity for telcos,” he added. Data centers, the facilities that offer computing capacity needed to run generative AI applications like ChatGPT, are another key area where telcos like SK Telecom can play a key role, Young-sang said.

In the Western world, the race to build data centers is one that’s been mostly dominated by cloud computing giants — or “hyperscalers” — such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. However, SK Telecom is aggressively expanding AI-ready data centers of its own globally, according to the firm’s CEO.

Jeetu Patel, chief product officer of IT networking giant Cisco, said he sees telcos playing a vital role as AI drives up demand for network traffic and bandwidth.

“The reality is this: the network bandwidth appetite is going to increase exponentially with AI,” Patel told CNBC. “Today, 100% of our workforce is human. Tomorrow, you will have that being augmented by AI agents, robots, humanoids, a lot of edge devices.”

“These agents are going to be more chatty and they’re going to require more network traffic and bandwidth,” he added. “I think service providers have a significant role to play. In my mind, the opportunity is not gone for them.”

China and the U.S. are in a race to create the first grid-scale nuclear fusion energy. After decades of U.S. leadership, China is catching up by spending twice as much and building projects at record speed.

Often called the holy grail of clean energy, nuclear fusion creates four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than traditional nuclear fission and four million times more than burning coal, with no greenhouse gasses or long-term radioactive waste. If all goes to plan, it will be at least a $1 trillion market by 2050, according to Ignition Research.

There’s just one big problem. 

“The only working fusion power plants right now in the universe are stars,” said Dennis Whyte, professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The U.S. was first to large-scale use of fusion with a hydrogen bomb test in 1952. In the seven decades since, scientists around the world have been struggling to harness fusion reactions for power generation.

Fusion reactions occur when hydrogen atoms reach extreme enough temperatures that they fuse together, forming a super-heated gas called plasma. The mass shed during the process can, in theory, be turned into huge amounts of energy, but the plasma is hard to control. One popular method uses powerful magnets to suspend and control the plasma inside a tokamak, which is a metal donut-shaped device. Another uses high-energy lasers, pointed at a peppercorn-sized pellet of fuel, rapidly compressing and imploding it. 

That’s how the U.S. pulled off the historic first fusion ignition, producing net positive energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, or NIF, in 2022.

Since then, private investment in U.S. fusion startups has soared to more than $8 billion, up from $1.2 billion in 2021, according to the Fusion Industry Association. Of the FIA’s 40 member companies, 25 of them are based in the U.S.

Traditional nuclear power, created from fission instead of fusion, has seen a big uptick in investment as Big Tech looks for ways to fill the ever-increasing power needs of AI data centers. Amazon, Google and Meta have signed a pledge to help triple nuclear energy worldwide by 2050. 

“If you care about AI, if you care about energy leadership … you have to make investments into fusion,” FIA CEO Andrew Holland said. “This is something that if the United States doesn’t lead on, then China will.”

While the U.S. has the most active nuclear power plants, China is king of new projects. 

Despite breaking ground on its first reactor nearly four decades after the U.S. pioneered the tech, China’s now building far more fission power plants than any other country.

China entered the fusion race in the early 2000s, about 50 years after the U.S., when it joined more than 30 nations to collaborate on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor fusion megaproject in France. But ITER has since hit major delays.

The race is on between individual nations, but the U.S. private sector remains in the lead. Of the $8 billion in global private fusion investment, $6 billion is in the U.S., according to the FIA.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup born out of MIT, has raised the most money, nearly $2 billion from the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Google. 

Washington-based Helion has raised $1 billion from investors like Open AI’s Sam Altman and a highly ambitious deal with Microsoft to deliver fusion power to the grid by 2028. Google-backed TAE Technologies has raised $1.2 billion.

“Whoever has essentially abundant limitless energy … can impact everything you think of,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies. “That is a scary thought if that’s in the wrong hands.” 

When it comes to public funding, China is way ahead. 

Beijing is putting a reported $1.5 billion annually toward the effort while U.S. federal dollars for fusion have averaged about $800 million annually the last few years, according to the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

President Donald Trump ramped up support for nuclear, including fusion, during his first term, and that continued under former President Joe Biden. It’s unclear what fusion funding will look like in Trump’s second term, amid massive federal downsizing. 

U.S. senators and fusion experts published a report in February calling for $10 billion of federal funds to help keep the U.S. from losing its lead. 

But the U.S. may already have lost the lead when it comes to reactor size. Generally, the bigger the footprint, the more efficiently a reactor can heat and confine the plasma, increasing the chances for net positive energy.

A series of satellite images provided to CNBC by Planet Labs shows the rapid building in 2024 of a giant new laser-fusion site in China. The containment dome where the fusion reaction will occur is roughly twice the size of NIF, the U.S. laser-fusion project, CNA Corporation’s Decker Eveleth said. The China site is likely a fusion-fission hybrid, FIA’s Holland said. 

“A fusion-fission hybrid essentially is like replicating a bomb, but as a power plant. It would never work, never fly in a place like the United States, where you have a regulatory regime that determines safety,” Holland said. “But in a regime like China, where it doesn’t matter what the people who live next door say, if the government says we want to do it, we’re going to do it.”

China’s existing national tokamak project, EAST, has been setting records, volleying with France’s project WEST in the last couple months for the longest ever containment of plasma inside a reactor, although that’s a less monumental milestone than net positive energy.

Another huge state-funded Chinese project, CRAFT, is set to reach completion this year. The $700 million 100-acre fusion campus in eastern China will also have a new tokamak called BEST that is expected to be finished in 2027.

China’s CRAFT appears to follow a U.S. plan published by hundreds of scientists in 2020, Holland said. 

“Congress has not done anything to spend the money to put this into action,” he said. “We published this thing, and the Chinese then went and built it.”

U.S. fusion startup Helion told CNBC some Chinese projects are copying its patented designs, too.

“China, specifically, we’re seeing investment from the state agencies to invest in companies to then replicate U.S. companies’ designs,” said David Kirtley, founder and CEO of Helion.

In the early 2000s, budget cuts to domestic fusion research forced U.S. universities to halt work on new machines and send researchers to learn on other country’s machines, including China’s.

“Instead of building new ones, we went to China and helped them build theirs, thinking, ‘Oh, that’d be great. They’ll have the facility. We’ll be really smart,'” said Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. “Well, that was a big mistake.” 

China now has more fusion patents than any other country, and 10 times the number of doctorates in fusion science and engineering as the U.S., according to a report from Nikkei Asia.

“There’s a finite labor pool in the West that all the companies compete for,” Binderbauer said. “That is a fundamental constraint.”

Besides manpower, fusion projects need a huge amount of materials, such as high power magnets, specific metals, capacitors and power semiconductors. Helion’s Kirtley said the timeline of the company’s latest prototype, Polaris, was set entirely by the availability of semiconductors.

China is making moves to corner the supply chain for many of these materials, in a similar play to how it came to dominate solar and EV batteries.

“China is investing ten times the rate that the United States is in advanced material development,” Kirtley said. “That’s something we have got to change.”

Shanghai-based fusion company Energy Singularity told CNBC in a statement that it “undoubtedly” benefits from China’s “efficient supply chain.” In June, Energy Singularity said it successfully created plasma in record time, just two years after beginning the design of its tokamak.

That’s still a far cry from reaching grid-scale, commercial fusion power. Helion aims to be first with a goal of 2028. Commonwealth has announced the site in Virginia where it plans to bring the first fusion power plant, ARC, online in the early 2030s.

“Even though the first ones might be in the U.S., I don’t think we should take comfort in that,” said MIT’s Whyte. “The finish line is actually a mature fusion industry that’s producing products for use around the world, including in AI centers.”

Watch: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/03/14/china-is-catching-the-us-in-nuclear-fusion-amid-ai-power-demand.html