As part of a 10-year partnership, Vodafone and Microsoft plan to provide access to generative AI, enterprise and cloud services to more than 300 million companies and consumers in Europe and Africa.

According to Reuters, the British company will invest $1.5 billion in “customer-centric AI” developed using Microsoft Azure, OpenAI and Copilot technologies, and will replace physical data centers with cheaper and scalable cloud services.

Microsoft, in turn, is investing in Vodafone’s managed IoT (Internet of Things) platform, which it plans to spin off as a separate business by April, and will also help expand the mobile financial platform M-Pesa (according to Vodafone’s website, M-Pesa is one of of the world’s largest mobile financial services, with more than 51 million customers in seven African countries).

“Generative artificial intelligence is really a game-changer in terms of the ability to create new services and new capabilities,” Vodafone CTO Scott Petty said in an interview with Bloomberg. This means Vodafone can launch a whole suite of customer service applications and make our software engineers more efficient and productive.

Previously, Microsoft briefly overtook Apple and became the leading company in terms of market capitalization – with the opening of trading on January 11, the corporation’s shares jumped by 1.6%, and the market capitalization increased to $2.875 trillion. This, in particular, was facilitated by Microsoft’s focus on artificial intelligence — the launch of ChatGPT from the OpenAI company in 2022, in which the tech giant invested $10 billion, and later the integration of the AI ​​product with its own programs.