Strategic collaboration to support research, AI model reliability and availability of new LLM for deep telecom domain capabilities.
November 25, 2025, MWC Doha: GSMA Foundry, GSMA's innovation hub, and Khalifa University of Science and Technology, a premier higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates, today announced a strategic cooperation agreement on the opening day of MWC Doha. The new collaboration aims to advance research and innovation in telecom AI through a shared commitment to knowledge sharing and digital transformation.
Khalifa University will collaborate with GSMA Foundry to develop specialized AI data assets, models and benchmarking frameworks for telecom applications, supporting the development of open, robust, secure and energy-efficient solutions for the industry.
In the first phase of this groundbreaking collaboration, the GSMA and Khalifa University will launch key Open Telco assets, including TelecomGPT, an advanced AI large language model (LLM) pioneered in telecom, with a chat interface hosted on LightOn and an Open Telco knowledge graph focused on 3GPP documentation, built using LightOn computing and hosted on Hugging Face. These assets are designed to accelerate the adoption of accurate, telecom-specific AI models across the industry.
The GSMA Open-Telco LLM benchmarks show that even advanced general-purpose LLMs struggle with telecommunications-specific challenges when interpreting standards, troubleshooting network problems, and managing telecommunications technical knowledge. Together with the 6G Research Center (6GRC) at Khalifa University, the GSMA is committed to reducing this gap by improving model performance in telecommunications to support the mobile ecosystem.
Professor Bayan Sharif, Chancellor of Khalifa University, said: “We are pleased to enter into this collaboration with GSMA, the global organization responsible for the mobile ecosystem, and offer our AI expertise to further advance innovations in the telecommunications industry. Our 6G Research Center has a successful track record in contributing to local and international telecommunications projects, and is fully equipped with its infrastructure and expertise to help develop AI solutions in collaboration with GSMA. We believe that the synergy resulting from the combination of resources will lead to targeted solutions. “AI solutions that will address critical limitations of current AI models.”
“We are excited to embark on this forward-thinking collaboration with GSMA, which marks an important step towards shaping the future of AI in telecommunications. By uniting the research strength of Khalifa University with the industrial leadership of GSMA, we are poised to set new benchmarks in reliability and innovation of AI models,” said Professor Merouane Debbah, Director of the 6G Research Center at Khalifa University. “Together, we aim to power the region's digital transformation, accelerate scientific progress and ensure that AI solutions for telecommunications are robust, reliable and prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.”
“Through our collaboration with Khalifa University, the mobile ecosystem will benefit from AI capabilities designed specifically for telecommunications, addressing critical areas such as network failure management and supporting operational decision-making,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO of GSMA. “This initiative is a testament to our commitment to secure and reliable solutions that help the industry move towards fully AI-powered network operations.”
“With the support of Khalifa University, the GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks community has gone from strength to strength and is now beginning to define the next generation of models for the telecommunications industry,” said Louis Powell, Director of AI Technologies at GSMA. “By collaborating with the Khalifa University team, we have created a collaborative ecosystem that is already accelerating innovation to ensure AI solutions are fit for purpose in real-world networks.”
The GSMA Open-Telco LLM Benchmarks initiative was launched at MWC25 Barcelona and has become a collaborative platform for leading mobile network operators to experiment and validate LLMs tailored to telecom applications. The community also features a leaderboard that highlights the performance of various LLMs in specific telecom use cases. The next phase of the community will expand its scope to include holistic evaluation (such as energy efficiency, time to first token, and task latency) and evaluate both agents and models.
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About the GSMA
The GSMA is a global organization that unifies the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver critical innovation for positive business environments and social change. Our vision is to unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry and society thrive. Representing mobile operators and organizations across the mobile ecosystem and adjacent industries, the GSMA offers its members three broad pillars: connectivity for good, industry services and solutions, and outreach. This activity includes advancing policy, addressing today's biggest societal challenges, supporting the technology and interoperability that make mobile devices work, and providing the world's largest platform to convene the mobile ecosystem at the MWC and M360 series of events.
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About Khalifa University of Science and Technology
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, the UAE's top-ranked research-intensive institution, focuses on developing global leaders and critical thinkers in science, engineering and health sciences. The world-class University strives to be a catalyst for the growth of Abu Dhabi and the UAE's rapidly developing knowledge economy as an educational destination of choice and a global leader among widely recognized international universities.
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