Nokia announces AI‍-‍native RAN platform

Nokia has announced what it says is the industry’s first commercial AI-RAN platform.

As AI becomes the dominant workload in mobile networks, telecommunication providers need more capacity, stronger economics and faster innovation without relying on traditional hardware upgrade cycles. Nokia says its AI-RAN platform helps telecommunication providers unlock significantly more uplink and downlink capacity from the spectrum and radio infrastructure they already own, providing a practical path to AI-native networks while improving network economics and accelerating innovation at software speed.

“AI-RAN is the biggest innovation in radio in decades,” said Justin Hotard, President and Chief Executive Officer at Nokia.” 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.

“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.”

Nokia says the AI-RAN platform has already shown more than 20% spectral efficiency gains through AI-driven radio innovations, and says it is on track to deliver 50% spectral gains by 2027 and more than 100% by 2028, helping telecommunication providers carry significantly more traffic in dense cells while reducing cost per bit and improving customer experience.

“Telecommunications is entering the AI era — the radio access network is the next AI infrastructure,” said Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of NVIDIA. “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.”

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