SoftBank and Nokia have agreed to conduct a field trial of AI-RAN in SoftBank's commercial network environment in 2027. Nokia's anyRAN and MantaRay will operate on the AITRAS platform to verify the coexistence and coordinated management of AI and RAN.
SoftBank and Nokia have agreed to conduct a field trial of AI-RAN in SoftBank's commercial network environment in 2027. The field trial will run Nokia's anyRAN RAN software on the AITRAS platform to verify its operation on a commercial network. In addition, the AITRAS Orchestrator and Nokia's MantaRay will be integrated to verify the coordinated management of AI and RAN workloads coexisting on the same platform while maintaining RAN quality and stability.
AITRAS consists of GPU servers, a virtualization platform and radio equipment, and can run third-party products, including the AITRAS-RAN RAN software, as well as edge AI applications. The platform is scheduled to incorporate NVIDIA Grace CPUs, Blackwell GPUs and ConnectX-8, among others, and its configuration is designed for integrated operation of AI and RAN.
The background to the initiative includes the need for low-latency AI processing capabilities in communications networks as generative AI becomes more widespread. SoftBank has stated that it is developing AITRAS with the aim of running AI and RAN on a common platform. The AITRAS Orchestrator is intended to optimize the allocation of resources for AI processing and RAN control in real time.