VEON and MeetKai Expand Collaboration to Explore Sovereign AI Infrastructure Partnerships
BARCELONA, Spain and DUBAI and NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES, March 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — VEON Ltd. (Nasdaq: VEON), a global digital operator (“VEON”), today announced the expansion of its partnership with MeetKai Inc. (“MeetKai”) to explore launching sovereign, locally-deployed AI infrastructure and in-country AI capabilities across VEON markets, with the intent to expand into further strategic partners over time.
A memorandum of understanding (“MoU”) was signed to mark the expansion of the partnership in Barcelona, where the Mobile World Congress (MWC) is currently under way.
The expanded partnership will accelerate rapid, standardized deployment of secure compute environments, aligned with data residency requirements and local governance processes, supporting development of AI-based services that meet market-specific needs.
The partnership brings together VEON’s regional footprint, customer access, user experience design experience and data center capabilities, and MeetKai’s sovereign AI platform, local language models, and AI application layer, supported by the expertise of MeetKai Atlas, a MeetKai subsidiary, in deployment standards and infrastructure playbooks that enable repeatable, secure rollouts of infrastructure solutions.
MeetKai’s platform is designed to deliver high quality LLMs at significantly lower development cost and lower inference cost through efficient post training, targeted optimization, and hardware aware deployment. The parties intend to apply these efficiencies across VEON deployments, aiming to optimize unit economics, accelerate time-to-market, and support faster returns on R&D investment while expanding AI services across consumer and enterprise use cases.
Kaan Terzioğlu, Group Chief Executive Officer of VEON, said:
VEON is building a sovereign, locally rooted augmented intelligence ecosystem that can be deployed in country and scaled responsibly across each of our markets,
“With this partnership, we look forward to developing end-to-end sovereign AI capabilities delivering a complete, secure, and culturally-relevant sovereign AI value proposition to the communities we proudly serve.”
James Kaplan, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of MeetKai, said:
MeetKai was built to deliver sovereign AI stacks that run inside sovereign borders, tuned to local languages, aligned with local policy, and designed to monetize across consumer and enterprise channels,
“With VEON, we will apply our model and inference efficiency to help roll out AI services faster, at lower cost, and at operator scale across multiple markets and beyond.”
This initiative underscores VEON’s broader commitment to drive inclusive digital growth through augmented intelligence solutions that address local needs in emerging markets. It follows an earlier collaboration initiated in November 2025 between MeetKai and VEON’s Kazakhstan-based AI and software company QazCode to develop and train next-generation large language models.
VEON and MeetKai intend to roll out the partnership across VEON operating markets, while also exploring expansion further where strategic partnerships and regulatory frameworks support sovereign deployments.
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VEON and MeetKai Expand Collaboration to Explore Sovereign AI Infrastructure Partnerships, source
