Nokia and SoftBank to conduct AI-RAN field trial in Japan

Nokia and SoftBank Corp. have entered into an agreement to conduct a commercial AI-RAN field trial in Japan in 2027. The trial will take place within a commercial network environment under real traffic conditions to assess the capabilities of AI-native network architectures.

The project aims to utilize shared computational infrastructure to execute both radio access network (RAN) functions and AI workloads simultaneously. This approach differs from traditional architectures where telecommunications and AI computing resources are operated separately. The deployment will integrate Nokia’s anyRAN software and MantaRay management platform with SoftBank’s AITRAS core platform and the NVIDIA Aerial RAN Computer (ARC) infrastructure, which includes Grace processors and Blackwell GPUs.

By blurring the lines between network and compute, the companies intend to evaluate spectral efficiency and the ability to distribute processing resources across different applications without compromising mobile network operational requirements.