By Fatima Gulzar
Publication Date: 2026-08-20 23:19:00
On August 12, AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) Chief Data and AI Officer Andy Markus said OpenAI models already power about 25% of the telecom’s total AI usage, with a target of 70% to 80% over time.
On the other hand, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang has spent the past month leading a consortium of companies championing open-weight AI more broadly.
Why This Matters
AT&T’s embrace of cheap open AI models and Nvidia’s public cheerleading for the same trend are both bets that open models won’t hurt the broader AI economy.
That raises the real question: does the open-weight wave actually threaten the AI infrastructure buildout, or does it just reroute where the money flows?
Photo by Robb Miller on Unsplash
The Bull and Bear Case: AT&T
Switching from closed, proprietary models to open ones cut AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T)’s costs by 80% to 90% in certain applications. The company processes an average of 45 billion AI tokens a day through a “smart router” that picks the cheapest suitable model for each task. Markus said, “we’re not scared of the token future.” AT&T also built its own customized open model, OTel, and says its AI initiatives have delivered a fivefold return on investment this year.
Some of the open models AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) experiments with come from…
