The vision of ‘RAN as the next AI infrastructure’ has a skeptical operator audience living with the fallout from open RAN and little additional revenue from 5G
Nokia announced what it calls the first commercial AI-RAN platform, “marking one of the most significant shifts in radio network architecture in decades”. However, it will only begin pilot deployments at the end of this year and be commercially available in 2027.
It is designed to accommodate its vision of AI becoming the dominant workload in mobile networks, which it believes will result in telcos needing more capacity to fulfil their role as providing an AI-distribution grid. This vision is driven by one Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of the world’s biggest AI chip maker, NVIDIA, which is pumping $1 billion into Nokia to accelerate AI-RAN innovation and “and lead [the] transition from 5G to 6G”.
The tech partners believe AI-RAN will deliver better economics and faster innovation by avoiding the hardware upgrade cycles of the past, instead working on a software subscription model.
RAN as AI infra
Further, Nokia states its AI-RAN platform will help telcos gain more uplink and downlink capacity from the spectrum and radio infrastructure they already own. Also, that the platform offers “a practical path to AI-native networks while improving network economics and accelerating innovation at software speed”.
The AI-RAN is built on Nokia’s AI-native network architecture and NVIDIA’s computing and has already shown more than 20% spectral efficiency gains through AI-driven radio innovations. Nokia expects to deliver 50% spectral gains by 2027 and more than 100% by 2028.
The irrepressible Huang said in the press release, “the radio access network is the next AI infrastructure…With Nokia, we are bringing NVIDIA CUDA [Compute Unified Device Architecture] and AI into the baseband, transforming RAN into a planet-scale AI computer.”
What do telcos think?
Whether telcos themselves are ready to make that transition remains to be seen. T-Mobile US, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) and Japan’s SoftBank have carried out various trails and high-profile demos at this year’s MWC in Barcelona. Nokia also launched its Doksuri line of remote radio heads (RRHs), describing them as “engineered to meet the performance and automation demands for AI-RAN workloads”.
On the other hand, the AI-RAN Alliance is an interesting bellwether. Nokia and NVIDIA are founding members of the organisation which was set up in early 2024. Although membership has grown fast, telcos seem to have held back. Some have cited the high cost of GPUs and there is skepticism about return on investment (ROI) in the short term, particularly after open RAN, which dominated the mobile industry for years, but largely fizzled out.
Even now there are only nine operators out of its 130 members – Globe, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Paradise Mobile (Bermuda), SK Telecom, SoftBank (founding member), stc, T-Mobile (founding member), Turkcell and Vodafone.
There also might be alternative approaches to achieve similar ends – such as Ericsson’s monetisation plan via its AI in RAN without GPUs, announced in June.
Analysts’ perspectives
Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group, always makes interesting reading. In the reserach house’s AI RAN Advanced Research Report published at the end of June, he notes, ““Our market assessment and long-term AI RAN position remain unchanged.
“AI RAN is already happening and will scale ahead of 6G. At the same time, these tools will enhance the RAN, but they are unlikely to expand the overall RAN market. Even as suppliers introduce new software-based subscription models, we expect AI RAN to generate little, if any, incremental RAN revenue the end of the forecast period [that is, 2030].
Dell’Oro projects cumulative AI RAN revenue to reach $35 billion over the five years from 2026 to 2030, which, as industry commentator Sebastian Barros, observes, “happens to match what the entire industry spends on RAN products in a single year, roughly $35 billion according to both Dell’Oro and Omdia, down from a peak of $45 billion in 2022. So, pretty much a stalled market maintains a similar investment path pre-6G Era.”
Rémy Pascal, Practice Leader, Mobile Infrastructure at Omdia whose comments were included in Nokia’s press release, said, “Nokia’s AI-RAN launch represents an important step in bringing AI-RAN from industry vision to commercial reality…The addition of the new AI-RAN node alongside [Nokia’s] 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.
“By combining AI-accelerated computing with a software-defined architecture and a clear product roadmap, Nokia is helping operators unlock greater capacity, improve network economics and accelerate the transition toward AI-native RAN.”
View from the top
“AI-RAN is the biggest innovation in radio in decades. 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,” said Justin Hotard, President and CEO at Nokia (pictured).
“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 ORAN-compliant radio units. For operators, that means more performance, better returns and faster delivery of new services.”
