Nokia’s AI-RAN platform arrived on July 15 with a claim worth examining: that it is the industry’s first. The vendor says the platform, built on its anyRAN software and NVIDIA’s Aerial system, will let operators pull far more capacity from the spectrum they already own, and it has framed the launch as one of the most significant shifts in radio architecture in decades.
The technical pitch is straightforward. Nokia says the platform has already shown more than 20% spectral efficiency gains, and it is targeting 50% by 2027 and more than 100% by 2028, the point at which, on its own projection, operators could roughly double the capacity of existing spectrum. Those last two figures are targets, not results, and Nokia’s own timeline puts pilots at the end of this year and commercial availability in 2027.
Operators would buy the capability through a software subscription rather than a hardware refresh, choosing from three deployment options: a GPU-powered plug-in card for existing AirScale sites, a standalone AI-RAN node, and a cloud-server build delivered through partners.
A comeback for Nokia’s weakest business
To read the launch only as a product story is to miss why it matters to Nokia. Radio has been chief executive Justin Hotard’s hardest problem since he took over in 2025. At Nokia’s November capital markets day, he told investors the mobile business had not delivered acceptable returns, and he folded it into a new Mobile Infrastructure segment alongside further cost cuts.
The NVIDIA partnership, announced in October 2025 with a $1 billion investment from the chipmaker for roughly a 3% stake, sits at the centre of that repair job. By building on NVIDIA’s silicon and CUDA software rather than its own custom chips, Nokia can cut a slice of costly in-house R&D and redirect it toward software, the shift Hotard has described as moving away from a legacy hardware model.
Investors have rewarded the story. Nokia shares have re-rated sharply through 2026 on the strength of its AI and cloud momentum, and the AI-RAN launch landed days before its second-quarter results. Omdia, whose analyst Rémy Pascal is quoted in Nokia’s own announcement, has put the cumulative AI-RAN opportunity above $200 billion by 2030. The direction of travel is real. The open question is how much of it Nokia can claim as a lead.
Is the Nokia AI-RAN platform really the first?
Here, the “industry’s first” label needs care. In June, Ericsson began selling a commercial AI-in-RAN software subscription that it says delivers up to 20% higher downlink throughput and up to 10% better spectral efficiency across more than 15 live deployments, and, crucially, it runs on operators’ existing baseband silicon, with no GPU required. On availability, Ericsson is already in the market.
Nokia’s claim to a first rests on a narrower definition: a GPU-accelerated AI-RAN platform, a different architecture from AI features layered onto existing hardware. Both statements can hold at once, which is exactly why the framing deserves scrutiny rather than a straight repeat.
The divergence, though, runs deeper than timing.
Nokia has tied its radio roadmap to NVIDIA, and its chief technology officer, Pallavi Mahajan, has acknowledged that at least some of the Layer 1 software is bound to the underlying hardware. Ericsson has taken the opposite route by design, keeping its AI features silicon-independent to avoid that dependency.
Nokia points to merchant silicon from Marvell in its wider ecosystem and describes the platform as Open RAN-compliant, but the performance case it is selling, those spectral efficiency gains, currently runs through NVIDIA’s stack, for which no equivalent alternative exists today. The openness in the messaging and the NVIDIA dependency in the engineering are both features of the same launch.
None of this makes the strategy wrong. Outsourcing the silicon race to the industry’s dominant AI-chip supplier is a defensible answer to a business Nokia had struggled to fix on its own, and the subscription model gives radio the recurring revenue its hardware cycles never did.
But the platform is not yet commercial, its headline efficiency numbers are still two years out, and at least one major rival reached the market first by a different road. For Nokia, this is a comeback in motion, not one already won, and its trajectory now runs, for better or worse, through NVIDIA.
See also: AI-Native networks are no longer a 6G promise–MWC 2026 just proved it
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.
AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.