The AI infrastructure giant pitched the telecom initiative as a way to help mobile operators ‘improve performance and efficiency as well as enhance network experiences’ for AI applications that now drive massive amounts of web traffic.
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it plans to invest $1 billion into Nokia as part of a major push by the company to expand in the telecom industry with a new AI platform.
Disclosed during Nvidia’s GTC DC event, the AI infrastructure giant said the investment is part of a new strategic partnership that will see Nokia adopt its newly announced Aerial RAN Computer to aid with the telecom industry’s transition to 6G cellular networks.
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The planned investment will involve Nvidia paying $1 billion at a subscription price of $6.01 per share, with the company noting that the transaction is subject to closing conditions. Nokia’s stock price closed on Tuesday at $7.77, up 22.8 percent from the previous day.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company pitched the telecom initiative as a way to help mobile operators “improve performance and efficiency as well as enhance network experiences” for AI applications that now drive massive amounts of web traffic.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during his GTC DC keynote in Washington, D.C., that the move with Nokia, a Finland-based company that provides telecom infrastructure, will put the United States “at the center of the next revolution in 6G.”
“Thank you for helping [the] United States bring telecommunication technology back to America. This is really a fantastic, fantastic partnership,” Huang told Nokia CEO Justin Hotard, previously the leader of Intel’s data center business, at the event.
The first carrier in support of the partnership is T-Mobile U.S., which will work with Nvidia and Nokia to “drive and test” AI-powered radio access network (RAN) technologies “as part of the 6G innovation and development process.” Trials are slated to begin next year.
“With America’s best network, T-Mobile remains committed to advancing next-generation technologies that redefine the customer experience,” said John Saw, president of technology and chief technology officer at T-Mobile, in a statement
At the foundation of Nokia’s so-called AI-RAN solution will be Nvidia’s Aerial RAN Computer Pro—shortened as ARC-Pro—which the AI infrastructure giant is billing as a reference design for accelerated computing systems that can aid with the telecom industry’s move from “5G-Advanced to 6G through software upgrades.”
Nvidia said the ARC-Pro reference design will enable manufacturers and network equipment providers to use commercial off-the-shelf or proprietary products to build AI-RAN products in support of “new buildouts and expansions to existing base stations.”
The first OEM promoted for this AI-RAN push is Dell Technologies, whose PowerEdge servers will be used to drive innovation in Nokia’s solution, according to Nvidia.
“The telecommunications industry owns the most valuable real estate for AI — the edge, where data is created,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell, in a statement. “This AI-RAN collaboration with Nokia and NVIDIA makes that potential real. We’ve built some of the world’s largest AI clusters with 100,000+ GPUs. Now we’re applying that expertise to distribute intelligence across millions of edge nodes.”
As part of its AI-RAN development, Nokia is working to “accelerate the availability of its 5G and 6G RAN software” on Nvidia’s CUDA programming platform,” Nvidia said.
“So what that means is we’re going to take this new technology and we’ll be able to upgrade millions of base stations around the world with 6G and AI,” Huang said.
