French telecoms giant Orange on Tuesday said it’s partnering with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Facebook-owner Meta to build custom artificial intelligence models designed to better understand regional African languages.

Orange said it’s working with OpenAI and Meta to develop custom AI models built on their respective Whisper and Llama open-source AI models — openly available systems that can be adapted to meet specific needs — that can understand West African languages not understood by most conversational systems.

Currently, much of the data major AI companies train their algorithms on originates in the United States, which means their models can lose important context, such as culture and language, when it comes to different regions like Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

That means it can be hard for those models to understand text and voice-based communications composed in less well-represented languages, according to Steve Jarrett, Orange’s chief AI officer.

“Having an open model, you’re able to do what’s called fine tuning, where you you introduce additional information to the model that wasn’t included when it was first trained,” Jarrett told CNBC in an interview. “We’re adding the recognition of West African regional languages that are not understood today by any AI.”

Orange plans to start by rolling out AI models that incorporate two West African regional languages, Wolof and Pulaar, which are spoken by roughly 16 million people and six million people, respectively, in early 2025.

Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia and southern Mauritania, while Pulaar is mostly spoken in Senegal.

The open-source AI models will be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial uses including public health and education, the company said. Orange plans to expand its custom AI model initiative to eventually cover all 18 West African countries.

“We’re operating in West African countries where a lot of these regional languages are being spoken in our contact centers, but where the current AI models don’t understand what these people are typing or saying,” Jarrett told CNBC.

Major large language models like OpenAI’s GPT, Meta’s Llama and Anthropic’s Claude aren’t well suited to Africans’ needs as they weren’t trained specifically on data originating from the region, according to Orange’s AI chief.

The move taps into a concept that’s been gaining traction globally, known as “sovereign AI.”

The term refers to the idea that individual countries and regions should seek greater control over the core technological infrastructure upon which AI systems are built, by localizing data storage and processing to ensure they represent specific languages, culture and history.

Orange is also looking to localize data processing and the hosting of OpenAI’s models in European data centers. This, Orange said, will give it early access to OpenAI’s latest and most advanced AI models and help it build new applications such as AI-powered voice systems for customer service.

Jarrett said Orange is committing to using AI “responsibly” and “not always using the massive, large language model [LLM] for every problem” given environmental concerns associated with the technology’s huge energy requirements.

In addition to using AI systems to improve customer service, Orange is also using the tech to improve a core part of its business: mobile networks.

“On the network side, we use [AI] to not only optimize how we plan the network, but also how we operate the network right,” Jarrett told CNBC.

“The volume of data is so large coming from all the network equipment that with AI systems, we can help identify those patterns in the data that could help us identify and predict failures even before the customer notices.”

The price of Bitcoin price retreated further from the psychologically important $100,000 milestone, as investors booked profits from the token’s post-U.S. election gains.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading down 6.2% at a price of $92,446.38 as of 5:55 a.m. ET, according to CoinGecko data.

Other tokens were also in the red. Ether, the second-biggest coin, fell 4.2% to $3,346.86 while Solana’s sol token dropped 8.9% to trade at a price of $231.88.

The entire crypto market capitalization — calculated by multiplying total coins in circulation by price — dropped $182 billion to $3.35 trillion.

Despite the drop on Tuesday, bitcoin has risen more than 30% since the U.S. presidential vote of Nov. 5, which resulted in the election of former White House leader Donald Trump.

The Republican politician has not yet been inaugurated. However, optimism around Trump’s pro-crypto policy platform in the leadup to the vote has reignited buzz for digital currencies.

Adding to optimism in crypto markets is the news that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, under whose leadership the agency took legal action against several major crypto firms, will resign on Jan. 20 —  the day of Trump’s inauguration. Trump had promised to replace Gensler at the agency’s leadership.

Rumble, a video platform aimed at conservatives, said Monday evening that it will begin allocating a portion of its excess cash reserves to bitcoin and making purchases of up to $20 million in the cryptocurrency.

Shares rose nearly 4% in extended trading.

“We believe that the world is still in the early stages of the adoption of bitcoin,” Rumble chairman and CEO Chris Pavlovski said in a statement Monday. “Unlike any government-issued currency, bitcoin is not subject to dilution through endless money-printing, enabling it to be a valuable inflation hedge and an excellent addition to our treasury.”

“We are also excited to strengthen our ties with crypto and to bolster our efforts to become the leading video and cloud services platform for the crypto community,” he added.

The move puts Rumble in the same company as MicroStrategy, which began employing an aggressive bitcoin-buying strategy in 2020. MicroStrategy’s shares, up more than 500% in 2024, trade as a proxy for bitcoin. Tesla and Block have also previously purchased bitcoin. Two smaller companies made the same move this year: Semler Scientific in May and Acurx Pharmaceuticals last week.

Rumble is viewed as a play linked to Donald Trump’s return to the White House given its popularity among conservatives. The alternative to YouTube went public in 2022 through a special purpose acquisition company led by Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick. Last week, President-elect Trump chose Lutnick as U.S. Commerce Secretary.

Rumble is up nearly 63% this year, and the stock has gained 42% in the past year.

Bitcoin itself, which came within shouting distance of the $100,000 milestone last week, retreated on Monday. It was last lower by more than 3% at around $93,000, but the flagship crypto is expected to hit the $100,000 mark before the year is over. It has more than doubled in 2024.

With Trump’s incoming administration expected to take a pro-crypto stance, investors are keeping an eye out for the next big company that will begin buying bitcoin. MicroStrategy chairman and bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor said last week on an X Spaces event that he plans to pitch the board of Microsoft in December on his bitcoin treasury strategy.

The theme has broadened to the government level this year, with Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) proposing a national strategic bitcoin reserve. This summer, Trump also mentioned a potential national bitcoin stockpile.