There was great enthusiasm about the opportunities for telcos providing infrastructure for sovereign data and AI edge services at a telco conference in London last week. However, there was little agreement on how this could be achieved. One of the main issues highlighted was that AI compute would not be hosted at the cell-edge, as per the AI-RAN pitch. In part, this is because telcos do not even have ownership of these sites, having sold these assets to tower companies, and secondly, because of the cost and energy supply required to achieve this. The glint in the eye of the ambitious operator is to offer edge computing, AI inference, local caching, and security solutions, and sell this to enterprise and…