VEON Ltd. expands partnership with MeetKai to explore sovereign AI

VEON Ltd. and MeetKai Inc. expanded their partnership and signed a memorandum of understanding at Mobile World Congress to explore launching sovereign, locally-deployed Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure and in-country AI capabilities across VEON markets, with an intent to bring in further strategic partners over time.

The expanded collaboration aimed to accelerate rapid, standardized deployment of secure compute environments aligned with data residency requirements and local governance processes and to support development of AI-based services that meet market-specific needs.

The partnership brought together VEON's regional footprint, customer access, user experience design experience and data center capabilities with MeetKai's sovereign AI platform, local language models and AI application layer, supported by MeetKai Atlas expertise in deployment standards and infrastructure playbooks. MeetKai's platform is designed to deliver high quality LLMs at lower development cost and lower inference cost through efficient post training, targeted optimization and hardware aware deployment.

A memorandum of understanding was signed in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress. VEON and MeetKai intended to roll out the partnership across VEON operating markets while exploring expansion where strategic partnerships and regulatory frameworks supported sovereign deployments. “VEON is building a sovereign, locally rooted augmented intelligence ecosystem that can be deployed in country and scaled responsibly across each of our markets,” said Kaan Terzioğlu, Group Chief Executive Officer of VEON.

“MeetKai was built to deliver sovereign AI stacks that run inside sovereign borders, tuned to local languages, aligned with local policy, and designed to monetize across consumer and enterprise channels,” said James Kaplan, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MeetKai. “With VEON, we will apply our model and inference efficiency to help roll out AI services faster, at lower cost, and at operator scale across multiple markets and beyond.”

The release contained forward-looking statements and said they spoke only as of the date of the release.