Nokia is running AI-RAN trials with BT, Deutsche Telekom, Elisa and Orange, and nearly 20 operators have publicly announced AI-RAN collaborations built on Nokia's anyRAN software and NVIDIA's Aerial RAN Computer (ARC). Nine operators across Europe, the Middle East and Africa are now building or expanding NVIDIA-powered infrastructure, according to the two vendors.
Reference design and supplier stack
Nokia's anyRAN software runs on the Aerial RAN Computer, with CUDA, Nemotron open models and an Agent Toolkit embedded into the vendor's Autonomous Networks Suite and into third-party operations software from Cisco, TCS and NTT DATA. Dell, QCT and Supermicro supply ARC-ready servers, and Red Hat OpenShift provides the cloud-native foundation beneath them.
Nokia frames the business case around assets operators already control at the land, power and shell layer, plus spectrum and fibre. Adding accelerated compute at centralised, metro and cell sites places models nearer to the machinery, responders and handsets that consume them, and lets the radio itself run inference.
Measured gains and the backhaul question
Lab measurements from Deutsche Telekom and Nokia put typical uplink throughput improvement for AI-based channel estimation in the region of 10 to 15 percent. That is a modest return for a distributed compute build-out. Backhaul becomes the constraining variable once inference moves outward, and Nokia's 800G coherent pluggables give an indication of the inter-site capacity the company expects operators to need.
Operator plans
Elisa completed Europe's first AI-RAN field trial, running voice, mobile data and vision AI together on one accelerated platform over 5G. Orange is introducing voice intelligence services for enterprises and emergency responders, Deutsche Telekom is working on physical AI for industrial customers, and BT is preparing live trials in the UK. Nokia and NVIDIA characterise this as a workload mix rather than a single radio feature.
Integration path and dependencies
Stacking anyRAN, ARC, CUDA and Nemotron into one reference design shortens the integration path, but it also ties operators to NVIDIA's programming model at the radio layer, with Nokia's RAN software sitting above it. Cisco and Nokia are both folding Nemotron open models into the software used to run autonomous networks, which extends that dependency into operations tooling.
Who pays and where value accumulates
Until AI-service revenue materialises, operators carry the financing for distributed compute and backhaul, while the suppliers of accelerated compute and RAN software hold the layer where incremental value would accumulate. Announced checkpoints cluster in 2027: BT's live trial in Birmingham, Deutsche Telekom's field trials, and Elisa's distributed deployment with commercial AI-RAN services.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said telecom networks were built to carry the world's conversations and will now also carry its intelligence, with leading operators turning land, power and connectivity into distributed AI infrastructure; with Nokia, accelerated computing is being extended into the radio network itself as a foundation for AI-native 5G. Pallavi Mahajan, Nokia's chief technology and AI officer, said the next era of connectivity would be defined by networks that distribute intelligence, continuously optimise performance and enable new AI-powered services including physical AI, and described a trusted software-defined foundation intended to help operators get more from spectrum today while opening a practical path toward AI-native 6G.