With artificial intelligence (AI) seen as a way to push more traffic through mobile networks, providing the foundation for a number of critical applications such as physical AI, where the network can power robots and sensors which need instant responses, Nokia and Nvidia are eyeing up opportunities in pushing AI into radio access networks.
While the AI hardware leader and global comms tech provider stressed how their technologies can support capabilities to improve radio performance, enable real-time intelligence at the edge and extend governed AI agents across network operations, the companies also noted the operators which would be testing and using their products – namely BT, Deutsche Telekom, Elisa and Orange.
Around a year ago, Nvidia and Nokia announced a strategic partnership to add the former’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered radio access network (RAN) products to Nokia’s RAN portfolio, enabling communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G Advanced and 6G networks on Nvidia platforms.
The aim is to drive wireless innovation in performance and efficiency, ensuring consumers using generative, agentic and physical AI applications on their devices will have “seamless” network experiences. The companies said that by working together, they are laying the strategic infrastructure and opening up a high-growth frontier for telecom providers by delivering distributed edge AI inferencing at scale.
The companies are now applying AI within the 5G signal-processing chain, including channel estimation, beamforming, multi-user MIMO pairing and scheduling. Nokia AI-native anyRAN software, running on Nvidia Aerial RAN computer, provides a software-defined foundation for integrating AI-powered radio functions that improve network capacity and performance.
Together, the firms believe that they can create the real-time network foundation needed for physical-AI applications while giving operators a practical path to improve today’s 5G and 5G Advanced networks and evolve to AI-native 6G.
“The next era of connectivity will be defined by networks that do far more than connect: They will distribute intelligence, continuously optimise performance and enable entirely new AI-powered services, including the emerging world of physical AI,” said Nokia chief technology and AI officer Pallavi Mahajan.
“Together with Nvidia and leading operators, Nokia is turning this vision into reality by bringing AI into the radio network and across network operations. This creates a trusted, software-defined foundation that helps operators get more from their spectrum today while enabling new physical AI use cases.”
Ronnie Vasishta, Nvidia senior vice-president of telecoms, added: “The next generation of telecommunications infrastructure will be built on a software-defined architecture. Nvidia and Nokia are combining CUDA accelerated computing and AI with Nokia’s network software and expertise to improve radio performance and deploy trusted AI agents. Together, we are advancing software-defined, AI-native 5G and laying the foundation for 6G.”
To offer evidence of the progress, the firms pointed to operator activity such as BT which has plans to trial AI-RAN with Nokia and Nvidia on the live network of its EE mobile division in Birmingham in 2027, alongside a 5G+ expansion taking coverage to 80% of the UK population. The update builds on EE’s continuing roll out and the launch of Fast Lane, claimed to offer the UK’s first commercial network slice giving businesses dedicated 5G+ connectivity at the busiest times on the network. 5G+ now carries more than 10% of EE’s data traffic, double its share a year ago.
BT will test whether gains reported in Nokia’s wider AI-RAN platform testing can be replicated with live customer traffic. Nokia has reported spectral-efficiency improvements of more than 20%; BT’s trial will use Nokia’s 5G software on Nvidia’s aerial RAN computer, assessing capacity, reliability and spectral efficiency.
In addition, Elisa which is running voice, mobile data and video analytics simultaneously on the same AI-RAN platform in its 5G network in Helsinki. This is said to demonstrate how AI-RAN can support radio and AI workloads in a live network environment. Distributed deployment and the evaluation of customer use cases and commercial AI-RAN services are expected in 2027.
Deutsche Telekom and Nokia are developing AI-based channel estimation as part of a broader set of AI-driven capabilities to improve network performance and efficiency. Initial laboratory measurements are said to have showed typical uplink throughput improvements of 10–15%, with greater gains under more complex radio conditions. The next phase will extend this work with additional AI spectral-efficiency algorithms and field validation.
For its part, Orange plans to progress on testing AI-RAN in both lab and real network conditions.
Together, these customer programmes are said to be part of a broader platform built around three capabilities: AI-led spectral efficiency to extract more capacity from existing spectrum; integrated sensing and communications to help the network understand the physical environment; and localised inference to process intelligence close to where data is generated.
