The content team at Channel Partners Newsletter tracks stories of interest to the technology advisor and wider channel communities. Anyone selling communication and connectivity solutions will want to stay abreast of these developing stories or catch up on ones they have missed. All links are valid as of Feb. 18.

Anthropic’s $30B Funding Shows Voracious Appetite for AI Financing Continues

Anthropic’s $30 billion funding is the second-largest private financing round in tech, behind only OpenAI's $40 billion round last year. The large numbers demonstrate that there is little appetite yet for any slowdown in the stratospheric investment in AI. OpenAI, which has so far had more success than Anthropic in the consumer market, is also seeking to boost its enterprise business and could leapfrog Anthropic as it pursues a new $100 billion round, CNBC reported. Read the AI Business story.

How AI Reshapes Public Sector’s Tech Talent

There is a tech talent deficit in the public sector — particularly when it comes to young workers. Just over 4% of federal IT employees were under the age of 30 (7.5% government-wide) in the fiscal year of 2023. And recruitment data suggests more than 80% of federal agencies report losing top tech talent to higher-paying private sector offers.But with tech giants continuing to cut workforces and growing concerns around AI’s impact on knowledge work, job seekers are now increasingly prioritizing stability over salary. Yet tech remains a highly fluid labor market, with 1 in 3 professionals having switched jobs in the last two years. Read the Fierce Network story.

IT Teams Scramble to Justify Mounting AI Costs

Enterprise technology budgets are expanding again in 2026, despite wavering confidence that investments — particularly in AI — will deliver measurable returns. IBM-owned IT cost management software provider Apptio highlighted the operational and financial complexities still shaping AI adoption, offering a more measured view of the market’s progress than recent vendor-funded research in a February report. Apptio surveyed more than 1,500 IT decision-makers in IT financial management and FinOps roles. Read the Channel Dive story.

Nvidia and Meta Expand GPU Partnership with Millions of AI Chips

Nvidia and Meta expanded their multiyear, multigenerational partnership as Nvidia will provide the social media giant with millions of its Blackwell and Rubin graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as its central processing units (CPUs) and networking offerings. The plan calls for Meta to use the products within its data centers for both training and running AI models. Read the Yahoo Finance story.

Optical Fiber Prices Soar on AI Demand

The AI infrastructure boom is not just raising memory prices – optical fiber costs are soaring as well, giving telcos something else to think about as they grapple with the emergence of AI. The strongest marker is the price of a single-mode G.652.D optical fiber, the mainstay of the carrier market, which rose 75% in January and is at its highest price in seven years. The China Electronic Components Industry Association has said China's four major optical fiber vendors are operating at full capacity and that foreign vendors are also close to their limit, according to a Hong Kong finance media report. See the Light Reading story.

MWC 2026: What to Expect at World's Largest Phone Show

MWC is always about phones, with some tablets, laptops, and other gadgets thrown into the mix. So what's different this year? Well, there will be a little more of everything, Mashable’s Stan Schroeder writes. This year marks the Mobile World Congress' 20th year in Barcelona, and it will again attract numerous large phone manufacturers which will show their new devices in Barcelona for the first time. Here is what to expect. Read the Mashable story.

Ericcson Places AI Bet on Intelligent Fabric

In his pre-Mobile World Congress media day session, Ericsson CTO Erik Ekudden talks about betting on distributed, deterministic infrastructure over hyperscale LLM gravity. “AI will not reach its full potential unless you combine it with advanced connectivity and distributed cloud,” Ekudden said. Read the Fierce Network story.

Dell'Oro: RAN market stabilized in late 2025

As the latest Ericsson and Nokia financial results indicate, the latest Dell’Oro radio access network (RAN) market report shows that the market “stabilized” in the latter part of 2025, after losing value between 2022 and 2024. Dell’Oro Group expect RAN will remain stable until 6G investments commence. In 2025, the top five RAN suppliers by worldwide revenue are Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung. Huawei and Nokia gained ground over the year, Ericsson and Samsung were stable, and ZTE’s RAN revenue share fell. Read the Fierce Network story.

OpenClaw Developer Steinberger Joins OpenAI to Accelerate Agentic Vision

Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the OpenClaw system that lets AI agents coordinate workflows, has joined OpenAI. In a blog post detailing the move, Steinberger wrote the switch represented the “fastest way” to bring his vision of bringing to life agentic systems that anyone can use. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described Steinberger as a “genius” and said his ideas around agents interacting with each other “will quickly become core to our product offerings.” Read the SDxCentral story.

Comcast, Classiq and AMD Trial Quantum Algorithms for Internet Routing

Comcast, Classiq and AMD completed a joint trial that applied quantum algorithms to improve internet routing resilience. The project focused on identifying independent backup paths during routine network maintenance, a combinatorial optimization problem that grows exponentially as networks scale. The companies said the trial demonstrated that quantum techniques, combined with high-performance classical computing, can address real-world network design challenges. Read the Converge Digest story