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-RAN node, and a cloud-server build delivered through partners.
A comeback for Nokia’s weakest business
To read the launch only as a product story is to miss why it matters to Nokia. Radio has been chief executive Justin Hotard’s hardest problem since he took over in 2025. At Nokia’s November capital markets day, he told investors the mobile business had not delivered acceptable returns, and he folded it into a new Mobile Infrastructure segment alongside further cost cuts.
The NVIDIA partnership, announced in October 2025 with a $1 billion investment from the chipmaker for roughly a 3% stake, sits at the centre of that repair job. By building on NVIDIA’s silicon and CUDA software rather than its own custom chips, Nokia can cut a slice of costly in-house R&D and redirect it toward software, the shift Hotard has described as moving away from a legacy hardware model.
Investors have rewarded the story. Nokia shares have re-rated sharply through 2026 on the strength of its AI and cloud momentum, and the AI-RAN launch landed days before its second-quarter results. Omdia, whose analyst Rémy Pascal is quoted in Nokia’s own announcement, has put the cumulative AI-RAN opportunity above $200 billion by 2030. The direction of travel is real. The open question is how much of it Nokia can claim as a lead.
Is the Nokia AI-RAN platform really the first?
Here, the “industry’s first” label needs care. In June, Ericsson began selling a commercial AI-in-RAN software subscription that it says delivers up to 20% higher downlink throughput and up to 10% better spectral efficiency across more than 15 live…
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