On June 18th, 2025, the first joint Telco Cloud Workshop was held in parallel with the ETSI NFV#50 F2F meeting hosted at China Telecom Information Park, Shanghai, China. This workshop focused on sharing views and challenges for the current and future Telco Cloud. Over 40 representatives from global operators and vendors, including NTT Docomo, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, BT, Huawei, NEC, ZTE, and Thales, discussed hot topics and technological prospects in the industry of Telco Cloud & AI. The event was jointly organized by China Telecom and Huawei. The accelerated advancement of AI and 6G technologies intensifies challenges for telco networks, making collaboration between standards bodies increasingly critical. This workshop marks a milestone by establishing the first dedicated platform for close cooperation between major standards organizations ETSI and CCSA. Moving forward, both parties will deepen their joint efforts to drive standards innovation, accelerate the deployment of AI-native telco cloud solutions, and support global operators in achieving network evolution.

The meeting was opened by Yoshi Nakajima, Chair of ETSI ISG NFV, and Xinsheng Nan, Deputy Secretary-General of CCSA. Nan pointed out that NFV technology, as the core for promoting network cloudification, has been applied on a large scale. In order to solve the challenges faced in promoting NFV, it is necessary to further deepen cooperation with international organizations.

Zhao Huiling, Chair of CCSA TC3, and Kostas Katsalis, representing ETSI ISG NFV, presented the latest updates from their respective standards bodies. ETSI ISG NFV outlined its focus on evolving architecture and infrastructure. The evolution of NFV is guided by principles including simplification, enabling software portability across diverse infrastructures, and providing native support for AI-driven operations through a new NFV‑MANO framework. Meanwhile, CCSA addressed current NFV challenges, such as the long-term coexistence of 4G and 5G networks, large-scale node failures, and meeting diverse SLA demands in B2B scenarios. Looking forward, CCSA emphasized the need for deeper cloud-network convergence, broader forms of telco cloud applications, and enhanced automation and intelligence capabilities.

During the sharing session by operator representatives, Huang Zhilan of China Telecom stated that telco cloud has entered the 3.0 era characterized by AI‑native. Telco cloud needs to introduce diversified infrastructure, and cloud platform capabilities need to transform from "resource centric" to "service centric", improve the level of intelligence and ecological openness, and strengthen the collaboration between cloud and network. Zhang Hao of China Mobile pointed out that towards the 6G evolution, NFV infrastructure is moving towards a new integrated paradigm of deep integration of "computing, network and intelligence", with the goal of building a unified and standardized full-stack architecture of intelligent computing foundation, covering multiple levels such as computing and network infrastructure, basic software, reasoning platform and MaaS services. Cao Chang of China Unicom emphasized that AI models and agents will drive the evolution of telco cloud from three directions: process automation, intelligent operation and maintenance, and autonomous networks, becoming an agile foundation to support upper-layer network applications, and will continue to introduce key technologies such as intelligent acceleration hardware, containerized architecture, grayscale release and intelligent fault management.

During the vendor presentations, Huawei advocated for intelligent telco infrastructure in the AI era through integrated xPUs and AI enablement platforms. Addressing performance bottlenecks and growing heterogeneity challenges, the company proposed unifying telco cloud architectures to support both general-purpose and AI computing, while establishing a consolidated MANO framework for integrated resource-service management. Meanwhile, ZTE observed that CNFs are replacing VNFs as the mainstream approach, reflecting telecom networks' deepening cloud‑native transition. However, ZTE highlighted persistent challenges, including scheduling precision limitations, elevated deployment costs, and compatibility gaps between open-source solutions and carrier-grade requirements.

The workshop further featured a roundtable discussion exploring the role of open source in telecommunications and the transformative impact of AI/6G technologies on telco cloud evolution. Experts engaged in in-depth exchanges on critical topics including AI Pool implementation strategies, distributed deployment models, and the convergence of Cloud‑Native and AI‑Native paradigms. These discussions yielded multidimensional insights to guide future NFV technological advancement and industry direction.