On October 28, local time, NVIDIA and Nokia announced a strategic partnership to add NVIDIA-driven commercial-grade AI-RAN products to Nokia’s industry-leading RAN product portfolio, enabling communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on the NVIDIA platform. Nvidia will also invest US$1 billion in Nokia at a subscription price of US$6.01 per share. Investments are subject to customary closing conditions.

This collaboration marks the beginning of the era of AI-native wireless, laying the foundation to support AI-driven consumer experiences and edge enterprise services.

In addition, the partnership also targets the fast-growing AI-RAN market and represents a significant opportunity for the RAN market, which is expected to have a cumulative scale of more than $200 billion by 2030, according to analyst firm Omdia.

NVIDIA and Nokia are also jointly laying strategic infrastructure to open up new high-growth frontiers for telecom providers by delivering distributed edge AI inference at scale.

T-Mobile US will also work with Nokia and NVIDIA to promote and test AI-RAN technology as part of the 6G innovation and development process, solidifying its global leadership in driving wireless innovation. Trials are expected to begin in 2026 and will focus on field validating performance and efficiency improvements for customers.

This move will significantly improve performance and efficiency, helping to ensure that consumers using generative, agent and physical AI applications on their devices will have a seamless network experience. It will also support future AI-native devices such as drones or augmented reality and virtual reality glasses, while being ready for 6G applications such as integrated sensing and communications.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said: “Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure – the digital nervous system of our economy and security. Built on NVIDIA CUDA and AI, AI-RAN will revolutionize the telecom industry – a generational platform shift that allows the United States to regain global leadership in this important infrastructure technology. Together with Nokia and the U.S. telecom ecosystem, we are igniting this revolution, enabling operators to build intelligent, adaptive networks that define the next generation of global connectivity.”

Justin Hotard, President and CEO of Nokia, said: “The next leap in telecom is not just from 5G to 6G, but a fundamental redesign of networks to deliver AI-driven connectivity capable of handling intelligence from the data center all the way to the edge. Our partnership with NVIDIA and their investment in Nokia will accelerate AI-RAN innovation and put the AI data center in everyone’s pocket. We are proud to partner with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies and T-Mobile US Together, we are driving this industry transformation and our first AI-RAN deployment in T-Mobile’s network will ensure the U.S. leads the way in the advanced connectivity required for AI.”