T-Mobile Announces Technology Partnership with NVIDIA, Ericsson and Nokia to Advance the Future of Mobile Networking with AI at the Center

To further advance its 5G leadership position that is already years ahead of its closest competitor, T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA, Ericsson and Nokia to design and drive the future of mobile networks with AI at the center, revolutionizing the capabilities of radio access networks (RAN) to serve customers in unprecedented ways. Leveraging T-Mobile’s 5G leadership, the NVIDIA AI Aerial platform and Ericsson’s and Nokia’s global leadership in telecommunications solutions, the consortium of companies, all founding members of the AI-RAN Alliance, are investing in an industry-first AI-RAN Innovation Center based in Bellevue, Washington, focused on bringing RAN and AI innovation closer together to deliver transformational network experiences for customers through the development of AI-RAN.

AI-RAN will dramatically improve customers’ real-world network experiences and ever-growing demand for increased speeds, reduced latency, and increased reliability needed for the latest gaming, video, social media and augmented reality applications they like to enjoy on their mobile and fixed wireless devices. AI-RAN will do this by leveraging billions of data points to devise algorithms that determine optimal network adjustments for maximum performance and to predict real-time capacity where customers need it. AI will not only power RAN performance and automate operations but will supercharge mobile network infrastructure to simultaneously run third-party AI application workloads at the network edge. AI-RAN comes in conjunction with other 5G Advanced features being rapidly developed with T-Mobile’s partners. AI-RAN concepts will be built in an open and containerized manner like Open RAN, with virtualized RAN and Core components managed from a central cloud, but AI-RAN is a game-changing technology because it will enhance the current Open RAN architecture with the addition of the accelerated computing that GPUs can bring to the intense network processing workloads of the future. In other words, this partnership aims to show that AI-RAN will make the promises of Open RAN more viable, while also going beyond.

“Just like T-Mobile led in 5G, we intend to lead in the next wave of network technology, for the benefit of our customers,” said Mike Sievert, CEO of T-Mobile. “AI-RAN at T-Mobile will be all about unlocking the massive capacity and performance that customers increasingly demand from mobile networks. AI-RAN has tremendous potential to completely transform the future of mobile networks, but it will be difficult to get right. That’s why T-Mobile is jumping in now to help lead the way with our partners. This collaboration between T-Mobile, NVIDIA, Nokia and Ericsson will truly define what’s next in mobile networks in the 5G Advanced era and beyond, and drive real progress where it’s needed. This group of visionaries will work together at our new Bellevue AI-RAN Innovation Center, and the partnership will not only propel the mobile network industry forward, but also has the potential to eventually advance many others as well.”