T-Mobile CEO: We'll make money from AI traffic, network slicing and satellites

T-Mobile's CEO, Mike Sievert, said the company stands to cash in on a variety of new technologies including AI services, 5G network slicing and connections from satellites.

2 Min Read
Mike Sievert, President and CEO of T-Mobile.Source: T-Mobile

T-Mobile's CFO Peter Osvaldik cheered the company's fourth quarter results, which exceeded most analyst expectations. And the company's investors cheered T-Mobile's improved outlook for 2025, sending the company's shares up almost 10% in trading on Wednesday.

But the company's CEO, Mike Sievert, said he's now looking beyond the company's quarterly results and on to bigger things. He said T-Mobile's new COO – Srinivasan Gopalan, who starts in March – will give him the time and space to "focus even more of my time on our longer term opportunities and strategy."

Sievert hinted at some of those opportunities and strategies during T-Mobile's quarterly conference call Wednesday: They include AI, network slicing and satellites.

Each of those technologies represents an opportunity for T-Mobile to make more money, according to Sievert.

AI and the DeepSeek angle

Sievert was asked about T-Mobile's network and how it might handle additional traffic from AI services. Sievert didn't say whether T-Mobile is seeing an increase in traffic on its network from AI, but he did say that AI in general represents an opportunity for T-Mobile to show off its 5G network.

"AI growth and AI workloads are going to be a way for us to increasingly showcase that [network] differentiation, especially as AI begins to make the leap from textual interfaces to much more video, audio, imagery," he said. "It's early days, but I think this is a nice tailwind for our business, because it's going to be important that we're able to showcase these advantages."

But Sievert didn't say anything about selling AI services directly to end users, like SK Telecom hopes to do.

Unlike AT&T's CEO, Sievert didn't directly discuss DeepSeek. That's the Chinese AI service that upended Wall Street this week over fears that DeepSeek can provide cutting-edge services at a fraction of the cost of established players like OpenAI.

However, some financial analysts are now arguing that DeepSeek won't directly impact Big Tech's massive investments into AI infrastructure, at least over the long term. "DeepSeek's contributions are noteworthy but part of the rapidly evolving generative AI industry rather than a big course correction in our view," wrote the financial analysts at BofA Global Research in a recent note to investors.

And the financial analysts at TD Cowen argued that DeepSeek and similar services won't have a long-term impact on the value of data centers (where AI services live) or telecommunications networks (which connect AI services with end users). "In our 20+ year experience, we continue to believe that in the long run 'hot water may win or lose, cold water may win or lose, but the plumbing always wins,'" they wrote.

Network-slicing opportunities

Sievert also said there's growing interest in T-Mobile's network-slicing technology. That offering, which relies on 5G standalone (SA) systems, allows T-Mobile to dedicate a chunk of its network capacity to a specific customer. The operator first put network slicing to use in its T-Priority service for first responders.

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