Microsoft Taps Lumen to Meet AI Data Center Demands

Microsoft has launched a partnership with telecommunications company Lumen Technologies.

The collaboration, announced Wednesday (July 24), will see Lumen use Microsoft’s cloud to further its “digital transformation.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, will use Lumen to expand its network capacity and capability amid growing demand on its data centers due to artificial intelligence (AI). 

“AI is reshaping our daily lives and fundamentally changing how businesses operate,” Erin Chapple, corporate vice president of Azure Core Product and Design at Microsoft, said in a news release.

“We are focused both on the impact and opportunity for customers relative to AI today, and a generation ahead when it comes to our network infrastructure.”

Lumen, Chapple added, has the network infrastructure and the digital capabilities required to help Azure create a reliable, scalable platform.

For its part, Lumen said Microsoft’s cloud and AI tech can help it cut technology costs, “remove legacy systems and silos,” improve its offerings, and create new solutions for customers.

Lumen said it will move its workloads to Microsoft Azure, use Microsoft Entra solutions to protect access and prevent identity attacks and work with Microsoft on telecom industry-specific solutions. 

“This element alone is expected to improve Lumen’s cash flow by more than $20 million over the next 12 months while also improving the company’s customer experience,” the release said.

In other Microsoft news, PYMNTS wrote last week that the company — as it continues its work to add AI to every part of the digital world — “has set its sights on conquering the final frontier of office productivity: the humble spreadsheet.”

The tech giant’s latest creation, SpreadsheetLLM, is designed to alter how businesses crunch numbers and make decisions. By tapping into the power of large language models (LLMs), this AI tool, which is still in the testing stages, could turn Excel from a static grid into a dynamic, question-answering powerhouse — potentially reshaping workflows for millions of users.

“The infinite cell-like nature and references to cells in spreadsheets make it challenging for LLMs, which have been trained using standard linear tokenization techniques, to understand the spreadsheet data model,” Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, co-founder and CTO of DataChat, a no-code, generative AI platform, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

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