MTN South Africa and Chinese ICT vendor ZTE have expanded a commercial rollout of ZTE AIR RAN EnergyTurbo — an AI-native closed-loop energy management system for cellular base stations — across the Western Cape in the second quarter of 2026, after a Cape Town trial reported significantly higher energy savings than the operator’s baseline energy-efficiency features could deliver on their own.
Under the trial, baseline energy-saving features across selected Cape Town sites delivered 2.8% energy savings per site. With EnergyTurbo layered in, savings rose to 13.5% — an additional uplift of 10.7 percentage points, according to figures released by the two companies. Following that outcome, MTN South Africa moved the solution into wider deployment across the Western Cape region.
The technical proposition is straightforward. Instead of applying fixed energy-saving rules, EnergyTurbo uses network AI to model traffic patterns, site-specific energy policies and real-time service demand, then makes closed-loop decisions on how each base station manages its power draw. That lets sites reduce energy consumption during low-load periods while preserving service quality when demand rises again — a distinction that matters commercially, because energy savings mean nothing to an operator if the network degrades during peak hours.
Luca Shen, chief executive of ZTE South Africa, framed the deployment as evidence that AI can move from theoretical benefit to measurable network outcome in African operating conditions. The trial, he argued, showed the practical value of “bringing AI-native innovation into live networks to support greener digital growth.”
Speaking from the technology strategy side, Ernest Paul, acting chief technology officer of MTN South Africa, emphasised that AI enables networks to make smarter real-time decisions — aligning energy consumption with traffic demand while preserving a consistent customer experience and supporting more sustainable network operations. Deployment was delivered in collaboration with MTN’s regional teams and its OEM partner.
The EnergyTurbo scale-up is one of the more concrete demonstrations to date of the “AI Inside” programme MTN Group set out at its Capital Markets Day earlier this year. In that strategy, unveiled by MTN Group president and CEO Ralph Mupita in Johannesburg, AI Inside is the internal-efficiency track of the group’s three-part AI portfolio — a margin lever measured directly in operating costs saved and capital spending avoided across networks, energy, finance, HR, legal and fraud. Group chief technology and information officer Charles Molapisi has separately described a longer-term plan to convert MTN’s African tower estate into a distributed AI compute grid, installing open GPU configurations at base-station sites so that the same hardware can run both the radio access network and edge AI inference workloads. EnergyTurbo is the nearer-term version of that thesis: using AI to run the network more efficiently now, ahead of the deeper hardware refresh needed to convert towers into AI compute nodes.
The deal also lands inside a broader pattern iAfrica has been tracking, in which Chinese ICT vendors — Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba Cloud — have been anchoring themselves into African AI infrastructure through operator partnerships, capacity building programmes and data-centre deployments. The Lawyers Hub / Agence Française de Développement report launched at the Africa Forward Summit earlier this year explicitly characterised China’s African AI approach as infrastructure-first, routed through Huawei and the Digital Silk Road. ZTE’s role here is more circumscribed — network optimisation software running on MTN’s radio access network — but the broader pattern is consistent: Chinese vendors are increasingly present in the AI layer of African telecoms, not just the passive infrastructure below it.
For MTN South Africa’s own investors, the operational question is whether EnergyTurbo’s Western Cape numbers survive scale. A 10.7 percentage point uplift at a trial site is one thing; sustaining that across a national network estate is another. But even at a fraction of the trial figure, the deployment represents a direct contribution to MTN’s stated R30-billion AI value creation target — the number Mupita and his team put on the group’s AI portfolio through 2029 — and one of the earlier operational examples of AI Inside moving from strategy slide to reported business outcome.
