At Mobile World Congress 2025, Nokia and its ecosystem of industry partners KDDI, SoftBank, T-Mobile US, and Nvidia have outlined the advances made in the deployment and optimization of revolutionary AI-powered Radio Access Networks (RAN) as well as the future architecture for AI-RAN.
These joint efforts will lay the foundations for developing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business models for CSPs, which helps them unlock new monetization opportunities by offering scalable computing infrastructure and capabilities for processing AI and other services.
Under its anyRAN approach, Nokia is evolving Cloud RAN solutions to include AI computing in the shared infrastructure to maximize resource efficiency for operators.
Nokia and Nvidia
Over the past year, Nokia has worked closely with Nvidia to assess and evaluate multi-purpose Nvidia-accelerated computing infrastructure to enable the transformative power of AI-RAN.
Nokia and KDDI
Nokia has also formed a strategic partnership with KDDI to research the practical applications of AI-RAN, including use cases and architectures, to make it commercially viable in the future. The companies will explore how AI applications can enhance the user experience, enhance network quality, reduce 5G network-related costs and power consumption through automation, and create monetisation opportunities that leverage GPUs and Generative AI. The companies will conduct a commercial trial using AI-enabled RAN hardware and research AI utilization to optimise network performance.
Nokia and SoftBank
Nokia and SoftBank’s innovative partnership has successfully showcased the powerful integration of multi-purpose, optimized AI workloads within the AI and RAN platform based on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. This is managed through Nokia’s MantaRay NM solution for network management and SoftBank’s AITRAS Orchestrator. This collaboration illustrates how both RAN and non-RAN AI workloads can efficiently share the computing resources, significantly enhancing resource utilization. This not only leads to improved operational efficiencies but also accelerates the return on investment for network operators.
Nokia and T-Mobile US
Nokia and T-Mobile are redefining the future of network connectivity by exploring innovative architectures for a multi-purpose cloud infrastructure. Since the announcement of the AI-RAN collaboration last year, both companies are working together to evaluate AI-RAN network architecture, the feasibility of using accelerated computing for L1, and to understand the co-existence of AI and RAN on the shared infrastructure using Nokia Cloud RAN and NVIDIA platforms. The companies are also exploring monetization opportunities and techno-economics of the AI-RAN multi-purpose cloud infrastructure.
“To fully harness the transformative power of AI-RAN, Nokia is working hand-in-hand with an ecosystem of leading industry partners. We enable the evolution of 5G networks toward a multi-purpose cloud platform that unlocks new revenue models and infrastructure synergies for AI and RAN while already today enhancing RAN performance and efficiency with AI-powered products and services,” says Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia.