Nokia today announced an agreement with SoftBank Corp. to conduct a commercial AI-RAN field trial in Japan in 2027. The planned deployment will use Nokia’s anyRAN software on SoftBank’s AITRAS, its core platform for AI-RAN, with NVIDIA Aerial RAN Computer (ARC), in conjunction with the AITRAS Orchestrator. The companies plan to validate AI-RAN technology in a commercial network environment under commercial traffic conditions.
The upcoming field trial will assess key AI-RAN capabilities in a live commercial network environment and represents an important step in SoftBank’s efforts to commercialize AI-RAN. It will also advance Nokia’s AI-RAN commercialization roadmap by moving the technology from laboratory development toward real-world deployment.
The planned trial will combine Nokia’s AI-native anyRAN Cloud RAN software on a SoftBank AITRAS platform with NVIDIA’s ARC platform and the AITRAS Orchestrator. The accelerated computing platform incorporates an NVIDIA Grace CPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 GPU and NVIDIA ConnectX-8 networking, providing the computing and high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity needed to run commercial RAN workloads on cloud-native infrastructure.
The AITRAS Orchestrator will support the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads within the trial environment, while NVIDIA’s programmable accelerated computing platform and NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem provide a software-defined foundation for continued AI-RAN innovation and an evolution path toward AI-native 6G. The trial will also demonstrate how Nokia's AI-native anyRAN software can operate within the SoftBank AITRAS platform architecture, highlighting deployment flexibility beyond traditional RAN implementations.