Nokia’s AI-RAN platform: a radio comeback that runs on NVIDIA

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-R...