diff --git a/google-cloud-bigtable/pom.xml b/google-cloud-bigtable/pom.xml
index a8e0dbeb52..62a92a3f94 100644
--- a/google-cloud-bigtable/pom.xml
+++ b/google-cloud-bigtable/pom.xml
@@ -206,13 +206,6 @@
     <dependency>
       <groupId>io.grpc</groupId>
       <artifactId>grpc-opentelemetry</artifactId>
-      <!-- TODO: remove this after next release (2.72.0). This is necessary to workaround a late downgrade of otel in cloud-shared-deps -->
-      <exclusions>
-        <exclusion>
-          <groupId>io.opentelemetry</groupId>
-          <artifactId>opentelemetry-api</artifactId>
-        </exclusion>
-      </exclusions>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>org.threeten</groupId>