SoftBank Corp has unveiled plans to become an artificial intelligence infrastructure firm, rather than just a simple telecommunications carrier.

The Japanese tech giant made the big announcement at the annual tech trade show Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

As part of a new business strategy, SoftBank said it no longer sees itself as a conventional telecoms carrier responsible for facilitating the transfer of “raw, uninterpreted” data from one point to another.

Instead, SoftBank wants to go further by developing and offering the necessary AI infrastructure for “enabling distributed AI workloads across edge and cloud environments”.

The company claims this major strategic shift reflects a fast-changing telecoms industry. It points out that, in the past, telecoms networks were designed for transferring data rather than comprehending its contents.

But SoftBank suggests that the rise of AI requires traditional telecoms providers to do more than just provide the infrastructure for raw data transfer. They need to put meaning behind the data, too.

As such, SoftBank is working towards a new Telco AI Cloud vision in which it sees itself as a “central nervous system” for all things data-related. This comes in the form of a so-called “active computation platform” powered by AI models.

The firm says this approach can provide its customers with “real-time, reliable inference” when needed, by “offloading GPU compute” and leveraging distributed edge-based AI workloads. The distributed edge refers to data management that happens closer to data sources - such as users’ services - for releasing benefits like reduced latency and faster transfers.

According to the firm, these changes in how it operates will result in it offering a platform that provides users with “meaning, not just data’ for improving how decisions are made across areas such as robotics, autonomous systems and smart cities.

“For Physical AI, this means resource-constrained robots can now perform complex, scalable behaviours that would otherwise be difficult to achieve independently; powered not by what they carry but by the network intelligence that surrounds them,” explained the firm in a media release.

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