The collaboration aims to enable communication service providers (CSPs) to deploy AI-powered 5G-Advanced and 6G networks, and will see Nvidia invest $1 billion in the Finnish vendor, becoming one of its largest shareholders.
The collaboration between Nokia and Nvidia signals the start of the AI-native wireless era, addressing a rapidly expanding AI-RAN market projected to exceed $200 billion by 2030, according to analyst firm Omdia.
The companies are creating a foundation for distributed edge AI inferencing at scale, enabling telecom operators to deliver new classes of intelligent, low-latency services.
“Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure, the digital nervous system of our economy and security,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
“Built on Nvidia CUDA and AI, AI-RAN will revolutionise telecommunications, a generational platform shift that empowers the United States to regain global leadership in this vital infrastructure technology. Together with Nokia, and America’s telecom ecosystem, we’re igniting this revolution, equipping operators to build intelligent, adaptive networks that will define the next generation of global connectivity.”
T-Mobile U.S. will collaborate with both companies to test and validate AI-RAN technologies as part of its 6G development roadmap, with field trials set for 2026. These trials will assess real-world performance, efficiency, and customer experience improvements.
“The next leap in telecom isn’t just from 5G to 6G, it’s a fundamental redesign of the network to deliver AI-powered connectivity, capable of processing intelligence from the data centre all the way to the edge. Our partnership with NVIDIA will accelerate AI-RAN innovation to put an AI data centre into everyone’s pocket,” said Justin Hotard, president and CEO of Nokia. “We’re proud to drive this industry transformation with Nvidia, Dell Technologies, and T-Mobile US.”
Future-proofed AI-RAN architecture
At the core of this evolution is Nvidia’s Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC-Pro), a 6G-ready accelerated computing platform integrating connectivity, computing, and sensing capabilities. It enables CSPs to evolve from 5G-Advanced to 6G through software upgrades rather than costly infrastructure overhauls.
Nokia will embed Nvidia ARC-Pro into its new AI-RAN solution and extend its AirScale baseband portfolio to support both cloud-based and purpose-built RAN. Leveraging its anyRAN approach, Nokia aims to simplify software-defined RAN evolution for global operators.
Dell Technologies plays a key role, providing its PowerEdge servers to power the AI-RAN ecosystem. “The telecommunications industry owns the most valuable real estate for AI, the edge, where data is created,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies.
“This AI-RAN collaboration with Nokia and Nvidia makes that potential real. The operators who modernise their infrastructure today won’t just carry AI traffic, they’ll be the distributed AI grid factories that process it at the source.”
John Saw, president of technology and CTO at T-Mobile, added: “Our collaboration with industry leaders Nokia and Nvidia marks an important step toward shaping the future of connectivity as we develop the innovations that will power the 6G era.”
Accelerating AI-native connectivity
The Nokia–Nvidia AI-RAN solution will unify AI and radio workloads on a software-defined, accelerated infrastructure, improving performance, energy efficiency, and scalability while future-proofing investments for 6G. It will also support generative and agentic AI applications, drones, AR/VR, and autonomous systems through seamless edge integration.
The companies will further collaborate on AI networking solutions, integrating Nokia’s SR Linux software with the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet platform and exploring new optical capabilities to advance Nvidia’s future AI infrastructure architecture.
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