Augie Fabela doesn't hedge. Put it to him that the AI debate is draining oxygen from the room, pulling operators away from the harder job of building digital services on top of telecom infrastructure, and Veon's founder and chairman turns the question over. He would look at it the other way, he says.
“AI is pumping oxygen into the room, giving us more energy, giving us more focus, because it truly is at the centre of our future growth,” says Mr Fabel about operations at Veon, the largest Nasdaq-listed company with its global headquarters in the UAE.
He is speaking to The National in New York, where Veon's global market leads have gathered for a board strategy offsite session on the back of another strong quarter.
Mr Fabela is not a conventional chairman. He co-founded Veon, then VimpelCom, in Moscow in 1992 with Russian scientist Dmitry Zimin. Four years later, the company became the first Russian business to list on the New York Stock Exchange. He later left corporate life to retrain as a police officer in Cook County, Illinois, before returning to the telecoms company he founded. He rejoined the board in 2022 and became chairman in 2024.
The numbers back the mood. Digital revenue rose 53.6 per cent year-on-year to $342 million in the second quarter, while the digital Ebitda margin reached 36.1 per cent. Digital services now account for 26.9 per cent of group revenue, up from 20.5 per cent a year earlier, prompting Veon to raise its 2026 guidance once again.
“It's not the first time,” Mr Fabela says. “Almost every quarter for the last four or five quarters, we've been upping guidance.”
Betting on hard markets
The company, which began as a telecom operator, is betting that digital banking, entertainment and AI will drive its next phase of growth. That comes as global investors debate whether the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into AI infrastructure will generate adequate returns.
Microsoft and Meta have continued to ramp up spending on AI data centres, while Samsung has benefited from booming demand for AI memory chips, highlighting both the opportunity and the enormous cost of the technology.
Asked what protects Veon if the AI trade seizes up, if there is a seismic shift or a meltdown in the frenzy around big tech and the hyperscale, Mr Fabela points first to the thing most investors would call a weakness.
“Our biggest moat, nobody wants to be there, but you know what? We love it. We love it. And we're making money at it, and we're making an impact on it.”
The rest of the moat is commitment. Veon stayed in Ukraine through the war. It stayed through currency crises and government changes across Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. “Not everybody can just come in as the, you know, Johnny-come-lately guy and say, I'm here to work and operate,” he says. “People respect those who have a commitment to a country and to a people.”
His customers, he argues, want the same calibre of service as anyone in a developed market, and they will pay for it. The proof is football.
Banglalink, Veon's Bangladesh operator, streamed the 2022 World Cup free, on the bet that nobody would pay. It drew 1.1 billion of watched minutes. In 2026, across a tournament expanded to 104 matches, Veon put it behind a paywall. Minutes watched more than doubled. “People paid happily. We had about 2.6 billion minutes. More, with paid, than you had for free.”
Frontier market advantage
Mr Fabela rejects the term artificial intelligence. “We define AI as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. It's very real. There's nothing artificial about AI.”
That philosophy underpins what Veon calls AI 1440, a reference to the 1,440 minutes in every day and the company's ambition to become a digital touchpoint throughout each one.
“We want to be touching our customers in every way, shape or form with our digital services over that time,” he says.
“We've made our bets with our countries. We made our bets with frontier markets. There's tremendous opportunity in terms of people having the demand side, and so we're going to just make sure that we're giving it to them.”
Veon completed its move to the UAE in late 2024, and Mr Fabela is blunt about why the country's AI position matters to him.
“The largest investments in AI are being made there. They're true believers. They're partnering. They're not pretending they can do it all on their own."
He said the UAE understands the value of AI, and what it brings. "Not the regulatory mindset that unfortunately you're seeing in ... for example, Europe: How do we stop it? How do we regulate it? What [should we] be afraid of?
"On the contrary, [the UAE is] thinking, what's the opportunity?” So it's a perfect place to be, he says.
