This report analyses the positioning of four hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Huawei Cloud – in the telco vertical. We evaluate how successful they have been at convincing telcos to migrate their workloads (from IT to the network) to the hyperscalers’ respective cloud platforms and we ultimately consider what the future role of hyperscalers in telecom will look like.

Spotlight on four major hyperscale cloud providers and their role in the telco realm

This report assesses the positioning of four major cloud providers in the telco vertical: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Huawei Cloud. It expands on our original assessment of the role of the three major US-based hyperscalers in telecom back in August 2024, which at the time included Microsoft Azure. We drop our analysis of the latter in this edition because of the winding down of the Azure for Operators’ business in June 2024. This doesn’t mean that Microsoft Azure no longer has business with the telco vertical – it does, but it signifies that the focus has changed.

There are other notable cloud providers, multinational (e.g., IBM) or specific national players (e.g., OVHcloud in France), but we are limiting our analysis to the four aforementioned cloud providers to contain the scope of this report.

If you are not a subscriber, enter your details below to download an extract of the report

Hyperscalers offer managed cloud services to telcos, as they do to any enterprises in other verticals. This means that operators can run their workloads using the hyperscalers’ cloud software platforms on servers that are located:

• In the hyperscalers’ data centres/facilities – in this case, the telco does not have to maintain any cloud infrastructure for that particular workload and gets it, often as-a-service, from the hyperscaler;
• In the telco’s own facilities – i.e. using on-premise servers. These can be servers that the telco owns completely, or they could be leased, including from the hyperscalers, also often on an as-a-service basis.

While this type of migration has been relatively successful for IT and IT-like workloads, the move from private to public cloud has been slow for certain so-called mission-critical workloads due to their specific requirements. This assessment, which we already made in last year’s report, remains true in 2025.

This report, based on research of more than 300 telco-hyperscaler partnerships and an interview programme, assesses the varying degrees of maturity by which workloads have migrated or are migrating to the public cloud.

Examining the migration of seven types of telco workload to hyperscale cloud platforms

Table of contents

• Preface
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• Huawei Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Related research

• Hyperscalers in the telco vertical: Strategies and successes
• Vendor-hyperscaler partnerships: Building the multi-cloud native future?
• AWS, Azure and Google Cloud: Who’s got the edge?
• External pressures shaping the edge AI landscape

George Glanville

George Glanville

Senior Analyst

George is a Senior Analyst at STL Partners, bringing expertise across a diverse range of topic areas, including edge AI, sovereign AI, and private networks. He specialises in producing our edge computing and network innovation research, contributing to reports and quantitative tools within both of these practice areas. Lately, his work has centred on how AI and distributed computing are reshaping the infrastructure landscape, including projects with the European Commission to assess Europe’s competitiveness in these domains. George joined STL Partners after obtaining a BSc in Economics from the University of Bristol.