NVIDIA and Nokia announced yesterday a strategic partnership to add NVIDIA-powered, commercial-grade AI-RAN products to Nokia’s industry-leading RAN portfolio. This will enable communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on NVIDIA platforms. NVIDIA will also invest $1 billion in Nokia stock.

NVIDIA and Nokia believe this partnership marks the beginning of the AI-native wireless era, providing the foundation to support AI-powered consumer experiences and enterprise services at the edge. Together, they are also laying the strategic infrastructure and opening up a new high-growth frontier for telecom providers by delivering distributed edge AI inferencing at scale.

T-Mobile U.S. will also collaborate with Nokia and NVIDIA to drive and test AI-RAN technologies as a part of the 6G innovation and development process. Trials are expected to begin in 2026, focused on field validation of performance and efficiency gains for customers.

The move will enable massive improvements in performance and efficiency, helping ensure that consumers using generative, agentic and physical AI applications on their devices will have seamless network experiences. It will also support future AI-native devices, such as drones or augmented- and virtual-reality glasses while being ready for 6G applications such as integrated sensing and communications.

NVIDIA is introducing Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC-Pro), a 6G-ready accelerated computing platform that combines connectivity, computing and sensing capabilities, enabling telcos to move from 5G-Advanced to 6G through software upgrades. The NVIDIA ARC-Pro reference design is available for manufacturers and network equipment providers to build commercial-off-the-shelf-based or proprietary AI-RAN products, supporting both new buildouts and expansions to existing base stations.

Nokia will accelerate the availability of its 5G and 6G RAN software on the NVIDIA CUDA® platform and expand its RAN portfolio by embedding NVIDIA ARC-Pro at the heart of the new AI-RAN solution. This partnership will enable Nokia’s mobile network customers to transition seamlessly from today’s RAN networks to future AI-RAN networks.

Dell Technologies is driving innovation in Nokia’s AI-RAN solution with its state-of-the-art Dell PowerEdge servers. Engineered for seamless scalability, these servers enable no-touch software upgrades and low-touch silicon upgrades, ensuring a smooth evolution from 5G to 5G Advanced and 6G. With their robust, high-performance infrastructure, Dell PowerEdge servers are the ultimate compute platform for operators deploying AI- RAN solutions.

There have been some doubts about whether GPUs really outperform CPUs, ASICs, etc. in 6G testing so we will have to see what the results are going forward. According to Joe Madden of Mobile Experts, “In my Virtual RAN forecast, I have thoroughly investigated the possibility of 5G or 6G networks running on centralized GPUs. Nvidia has demonstrated great performance with SoftBank, but when I peel back the layers, I find that most of the performance benefits came from distributed MIMO, not from GPU-based AI algorithms. So far, GPU-based AI-RAN seems to be too expensive for mobile networks, and most of the benefits can be achieved with AI-RAN on CPUs, whether that  comes in the form of ASICs or SoCs. There may be other areas of synergy that I’m not aware of, but I can say that betting $100 billion of investor goodwill on GPU-based RAN is a very speculative investment.”