Telecom Players Establish AI-RAN Center

Nvidia, Ericsson, Nokia, and T-Mobile US announced the first AI-RAN Innovation Center. It is based in T-Mobile’s hometown of Bellevue, Washington.

The consortium of companies, all of which are founding members of the AI-RAN Alliance, said they are collaborating to revolutionize the capabilities of RAN networks with AI at the center. T-Mobile claims the center will align with the AI-RAN Alliance’s work and show that AI-RAN will make the promises of open RAN more viable, while also going beyond.

“AI-RAN has tremendous potential to completely transform the future of mobile networks, but it will be difficult to get right. That’s why T-Mobile is jumping in now to help lead the way with our partners,” said the operator’s CEO Mike Sievert.

Also commenting, Ericsson counterpart Borje Ekholm said the center “is set to drive standardization, industry alignment and accelerate the adoption of AI-RAN technologies.” He added it “paves the way for potentially limitless innovations in network performance, reliability, and efficiency”.

The companies noted the AI-RAN concepts would be built in an open and containerized manner like open RAN but with the addition of accelerated computing that GPUs bring to network processing workloads. The center will also use the newly announced Nvidia AI Aerial platform, which is a suite of computing software and hardware for designing, simulating, training, and deploying AI-RAN on wireless networks.