Nvidia to invest $1B in Nokia for the AI-RAN market (capacityglobal.com)

Nvidia will invest $1 billion in Nokia and partner with the Finnish vendor (with Dell and T‑Mobile as ecosystem partners) to build an “AI‑RAN” — an AI‑native radio access network intended to let carriers deploy AI‑powered 5G‑Advanced and 6G services. The move positions Nvidia as one of Nokia’s largest shareholders and targets a rapidly expanding AI‑RAN market analysts peg above $200B by 2030. T‑Mobile U.S. will join field trials in 2026 to validate real‑world performance, latency, efficiency, and customer experience improvements. The technical foundation is Nvidia’s Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC‑Pro), a 6G‑ready accelerated compute platform that Nokia will embed into its AirScale baseband and anyRAN software stack so operators can evolve to 6G largely via software upgrades. Dell’s PowerEdge servers will supply edge compute, while Nokia and Nvidia will integrate SR Linux with Nvidia’s Spectrum‑X Ethernet and explore optical advances. The result is a unified, software‑defined accelerated infrastructure for distributed edge inferencing that promises lower latency, better energy efficiency, and support for generative/agentic AI, AR/VR, drones and autonomous systems. For the AI/ML community this emphasizes a shift toward edge model deployment, hardware‑software co‑design, and new operational challenges and opportunities around model partitioning, inference orchestration, and secure, scalable edge training/inferencing.