Nokia claims to have launched the industry’s first commercial AI radio access network (AI-RAN) platform, promising to help carriers unlock “significantly more uplink and downlink capacity” from existing infrastructure.
Built using the Finnish firm’s network architecture and with a little support from Nvidia's computing power, Nokia’s AI-RAN platform will be offered via a software subscription model. Carriers can tap a new GPU-powered AirScale capacity plug-in unit for existing AirScale solutions, providing a streamlined upgrade path.
For operators wanting more flexibility, there’s an AI-RAN node that can be deployed as a standalone or in a clustered configuration. Alternatively, it can be offered alongside AirScale as a single logical base station. In addition, for those with cloud-native ambitions, Nokia’s offering a GPU-powered AI-RAN COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) server. Nokia's existing portfolio, meanwhile, will be “fully open RAN-compliant” so operators can “modernize at their own pace.” Nokia CEO Justin Hotard said AI-RAN is “the biggest innovation in radio in decades” and claimed operators would see improved performance, better return on investment, and faster delivery of new services.
“AI-RAN makes the network intelligent, extends AI into the physical world, and allows telcos to get more from their existing infrastructure, including a software upgrade path to 6G,” Hotard said in a statement. “Nokia’s AnyRAN software, powered by Nvidia’s Aerial AI-RAN platform, unlocks greater performance from the spectrum operators already have and can be deployed with existing Nokia or open RAN-compliant radio units.”
Nokia’s AI-RAN offerings are set to enter pilot deployments at the end of this year, before being made commercially available in 2027.
The launch marks the culmination of several years of hawking what Nokia claims is the next big thing, billing AI-RAN as a generational leap in telecoms. Alongside its growing efforts in the data center space, AI-RAN quickly shoved its way to the fore as a core focus for the vendor, with a cool $1 billion investment from Nvidia used to fuel its efforts in the fledgling segment.
None other than Jensen Huang himself came out to back Nokia’s AI-RAN roadmap this week, saying “the radio access network is the next AI infrastructure.”
“Together with Nokia, we are bringing Nvidia CUDA and AI into the baseband, transforming RAN into a planet-scale AI computer. This is a generational shift for operators – unlocking more capacity and efficiency from today’s spectrum while creating the foundation for new AI services and the 6G era,” the Nvidia CEO added.
Earlier this year, Nokia unveiled its Doksuri line of remote radio heads (RRHs), touting them at Mobile World Congress as being “engineered to meet the performance and automation demands for AI-RAN workloads."
Among its early tests in the growing space, Nokia worked with T-Mobile US on GPU-accelerated AI-RAN workloads at its AI-RAN Innovation Center at the carrier's Seattle headquarters. Southeast Asian carrier Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) also previously trialed Nokia’s Nvidia-augmented AI-RAN offerings, having demoed Nokia’s AirScale RRHs and RAN software running on Nvidia GPUs to power an AI RAN-powered layer-three 5G call.
Nokia, along with its backers at Nvidia, is a member of the AI-RAN Alliance, which surpassed some 130 members back in January.
“Nokia’s AI-RAN launch represents an important step in bringing AI-RAN from industry vision to commercial reality,” said Rémy Pascal, practice leader for mobile infrastructure at analyst firm Omdia. “The addition of the new AI-RAN node alongside the AirScale capacity plug-in unit and cloud-native deployment options gives operators practical choices for adopting AI-native networks based on their existing infrastructure and transformation goals.”