BARCELONA — Europe’s telecommunication firms are ramping up calls for more industry consolidation to help the region compete more effectively with superpowers like the U.S. and China on key technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence.

Last week at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, CEOs of several telecoms firms called on regulators to make it easier for them to combine their operations with other businesses and reduce the overall number of carriers operating across the continent.

Currently, there are numerous telco players operating in multiple EU countries and non-EU members such as the U.K. However, telco chiefs told CNBC this situation is untenable, as they’re unable to compete effectively when it comes to price and network quality.

“If we’re going to invest in technology, in deep know-how, and bring drastic change, positive drastic change in Europe — like other large technological companies have done in the U.S. or we’re seeing today in China — we need scale,” Marc Murtra, CEO of Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, told CNBC’s Karen Tso in an interview.

“To be able to get scale, we need to consolidate a fragmented market like the telecoms market in Europe,” Murtra added. “And for that, we need a regulation that allows us to consolidate. So what we do ask is: please unleash us. Let us gain scale. Let us invest in technology and bring upon productive change.”

Christel Heydemann, CEO of French carrier Orange, said that while some mega-deal activity is starting to gather pace in Europe, more needs to be done to guarantee the continent’s competitiveness on the world stage.

Last year, Orange closed a deal to merge its Spanish operations with local mobile network provider Masmovil. Meanwhile, more recently, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority approved a £15 billion ($19 billion) merger between telecoms firms Vodafone and Three in the U.K., subject to certain conditions.

“We’ve been actively driving consolidation in Europe,” Orange’s Heydemann told CNBC. “We see things changing now. There’s still a lot of hope.”

However, she added: “I think there’s a lot of pressure in Europe from the business environment on our political leaders to get things to change. But really, things have not yet changed.”

During a fiery keynote address on Monday, the CEO of German telco Deutsche Telekom, Tim Höttges, said that other telco markets such as the U.S. and India have condensed in size to only a handful of players.

The American telco industry is dominated by its three largest mobile network operators, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. T-Mobile is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom.

“We need a reform of the of the competition policy,” Höttges said onstage at MWC. “We have to be allowed to consolidate our activities.”

“There is no reason that every market has to operate with three or four operators,” he added. “We should build a European single market … because, if we cannot increase our consumer prices, if we cannot charge the over-the-top players, we have to get efficiencies out of the scale which we created.”

“Over-the-top” refers to media platforms such as Netflix that deliver content over the internet, bypassing traditional cable networks.

Meanwhile, last year former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi released a long-awaited report that urged radical reforms to the EU through a new industrial strategy to ensure its competitiveness.

It also calls for a new Digital Networks Act that would look to improve incentives for telcos to build next-generation mobile networks, reduce compliance costs, improve connectivity for end-users, and harmonize EU policy across the network spectrum, or the range of radio frequencies used for wireless communication.

“The common theme and the mood music is certainly reducing ex-ante regulation and to foster what they would call a more competitive environment which is an environment more conducive of consolidation,” Ookla’s Kehoe told CNBC. “Moving forward, I think that there will be more consolidation.”

However, the telco industry has some way to go toward seeing transformational cross-border mergers and acquisitions, Kehoe added.

For many telco industry analysts, the demands for increased consolidation is nothing new.

“European telco CEOs have never been shy about calling for consolidation and growth-friendly regulation,” Nik Willetts, CEO of the telco industry association TM Forum, told CNBC. “But regulation is only one piece of the puzzle.”

“In the last 12 months we’ve seen a new energy from our members in Europe to get on with the huge task to transform themselves: simplifying, modernizing and automating their operations and legacy tech.”

“This will make it possible to rapidly adapt to new customer needs and market realities, whether building new partnerships, undergoing M&A or delayering integrated businesses – all trends we expect to reach new heights over the next 24 months,” he added.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to reveal details about Rubin, the chipmaker’s next AI graphics processor, on Tuesday at the company’s annual GTC conference. 

While other tech companies usually name their products using combinations of inscrutable letters and numbers, most of Nvidia’s most recent GPU architectures have been named after famous women scientists.

Nvidia is naming its next critical AI chip platform after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer.

The company has never explained its naming convention, and hasn’t emphasized the diversity aspect of its choices, but Nvidia’s chip names that highlight women and minority scientists are one of the most visible efforts to honor diversity in the tech industry during a period where diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives are being slashed by the Trump administration.

Rubin discovered a lot of what is known about “dark matter,” a form of matter that could make up a quarter of the matter of the universe and which doesn’t emit light or radiation, and she advocated for women in science throughout her career.

Nvidia has been naming its architectures after scientists since 1998, when its first chips were based on the company’s “Fahrenheit” microarchitecture. It’s part of the company’s culture – Nvidia used to sell an employee-only t-shirt with cartoons of several famous scientists on it.

It’s one of Nvidia’s quirks that has received more attention as it’s risen to become one of the three most-valuable tech companies and one of the most important suppliers to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Tesla and Meta.

Investors want to hear on Tuesday how fast the Rubin chips will be, what configurations it will come in and when it might start shipping.

Before revealing a new architecture, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang usually gives a one-sentence biography of the scientist it’s named after.

“I’d like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU named after David Blackwell, mathematician, game theorist, probability,” Huang said at last year’s GTC conference. “We thought it was a perfect name.”

Rubin is a fitting name for Nvidia’s next chip, which comes as the company tries to solidify the gains it has made in recent years as the leader in AI hardware. “Vera” will refer to Nvidia’s next-generation central processor, and “Rubin” will refer to Nvidia’s new GPU.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Rubin studied deep space and worked with other scientists to develop better telescopes and instruments that could collect more detailed data about the universe. In 1968, according to a Nova documentary, she started observing the Andromeda galaxy and collecting the data that would upend science’s understanding of our universe.

Her primary claim to fame came after she observed how quickly galaxies rotate.

“The presumption was that the stars near the center of a galaxy would be orbiting very rapidly, and stars at the outside would be going very slowly,” Rubin said in 1987.

But Rubin realized that she was observing that outer stars were moving quickly, contrary to expectations. They weren’t flying out of orbit, which meant that there had to be more mass scientists weren’t observing — confirming the concept of dark matter.

She was acclaimed during her lifetime, published over 100 papers and held three advanced degrees, but she still faced discrimination because of her sex. Early in her career, Rubin wasn’t allowed to collect her own data, and some observatories didn’t allow women, according to the documentary.

Rubin died in 2016. In 2019, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a state-of-the-art telescope in Chile, was named after her. A biography on the federally-funded observatory’s website was edited to remove details about her advocacy for women in science earlier this year, according to ProPublica.

“I hope you will love your work as I love doing astronomy,” Rubin said at a commencement address in 1996. “I hope that you will fight injustice and discrimination in all its guises.”

Rubin isn’t the first woman to be honored with an Nvidia chip named after her.

Before Blackwell, who was the first Black American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip family was Hopper, named after American computer scientist Grace Hopper, who coined the term “bug” to refer to computer glitches. In 2022, Nvidia released its “Ada Lovelace” architecture, named after the British mathematician who pioneered computer algorithms in the 19th century.

The scientist names used to be a secondary naming convention, taking a back seat to the actual product name, and primarily appearing in marketing copy. Nvidia users more frequently referred to the “H100” chip or marketing names for consumer graphics cards like GeForce RTX 3090.

But last year, Huang emphasized that Blackwell wasn’t a single chip, it was a technology platform, and Nvidia increasingly started using the term “Blackwell” to refer to all of the company’s latest-generation AI products, such as its GB200 chip and DGX server racks.

Now investors and analysts track how many “Hoppers” are in use, and big companies brag about having early access to “Blackwell.”

It’s critical for Nvidia that Rubin achieve the same last-name familiarity level as Hopper and Blackwell.

The company’s sales more than doubled in its fiscal 2025, ended January, to $124.62 billion, thanks to durable sales for the company’s Hopper chips and early demand for the company’s Blackwell chips.

In order to keep growth rising, Nvidia needs to deliver a next-generation chip that justifies its cost and improves on the previous generation’s speeds, power efficiency and cost of ownership.

The company has targeted 2026 for a rollout of the Vera chips, according to an investor presentation last fall. In addition to Vera Rubin, Nvidia is expected to discuss Blackwell Ultra, an updated version of its Blackwell chips that analysts expect the company to start selling later this year.

Huang also teased during an earnings call last month that he’ll show the “next click” after Vera Rubin. That architecture will likely be named after a scientist, too.

“These products should excite partners at the conference ranging from Microsoft to Dell to sovereigns, which normally would please investors,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note on Monday.

Tuesday’s keynote will also be a test of Nvidia’s relatively new release cadence, where it strives to reveal new chips on an annual basis. Investors will also want to see whether Nvidia can continue to impress tech critics and developers while releasing new chip families on a faster schedule than it’s used to. Blackwell was announced last March, and its sales started showing up in Nvidia’s October quarter.

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