T-Mobile Completes First AI-RAN Call on a Commercial Network With NVIDIA and Nokia

NVIDIA on Wednesday said telecom operators are adding its accelerated computing to data centers, metro sites and cell sites to run AI models and services closer to users, with Nokia supplying the radio software.

AI-RAN on live networks
T-Mobile completed what NVIDIA calls the world's first AI-RAN call on a live commercial network in Bellevue, Washington, using commercial Aerial RAN Computer (ARC) servers, Nokia's CUDA-accelerated RAN software and massive MIMO radios connected to an existing 5G Standalone core. BT plans live AI-RAN trials in Birmingham, England, in 2027. Deutsche Telekom validated the Nokia and NVIDIA platform in its Bonn and Oulu labs and plans field trials in 2027. Elisa ran voice, mobile data and video analytics simultaneously on ARC in a 5G field trial, and Orange is testing Nokia 5G software on ARC. NVIDIA says nearly 20 operators have publicly announced AI-RAN collaborations using Nokia anyRAN and ARC.

New ARC configurations
NVIDIA introduced MGX 2U and MGX 4U ARC configurations for high-capacity centralized RAN sites, powered by RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs with x86 and NVIDIA Vera CPU options. Dell Technologies, Quanta Cloud Technology and Supermicro will offer ARC-ready servers.

Infrastructure in EMEA
New NVIDIA-powered infrastructure is coming from CRA in the Czech Republic, etisalat in the UAE, Silknet in Georgia and TIM in Italy, with expansions at Cassava in Africa, Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Fastweb + Vodafone in Italy, Kazakhtelecom in Central Asia and Orion Telecom in Serbia. Deutsche Telekom will expand its Industrial AI Cloud, and Orange is hosting Nemotron models on its Live Intelligence platform.

Agents for network operations
Nokia is integrating Nemotron into its Autonomous Networks Suite and using NVIDIA Agent Toolkit to build agents for fixed, radio, core and transport networks. Cisco has fine-tuned Nemotron for Crosswork AI, and TCS, BT and NTT DATA are building Nemotron-based agents for site validation, field-photo inspection and degradation detection.

"Telecom networks were built to carry the world's conversations. Now, they will also carry the world's intelligence," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO.