Nvidia, Ericsson, Nokia and T-Mobile US teamed on what they claim is the industry’s first AI-RAN Innovation Centre, based in the mobile operator’s hometown of Bellevue, Washington.

The consortium of companies, all of which are founding members of the AI-RAN Alliance, stated they are collaborating to revolutionise the capabilities of RAN networks “with AI at the centre”.

T-Mobile claimed the centre will align with the AI-RAN Alliance’s work and show “that AI-RAN will make the promises of open RAN more viable, while also going beyond”.

“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,” said the operator’s CEO Mike Sievert.

Also commenting, Ericsson counterpart Borje Ekholm said the centre “is set to drive standardisation, industry alignment and accelerate the adoption of AI-RAN technologies,” which “paves the way for potentially limitless innovations in network performance, reliability and efficiency”.

The companies noted the AI-RAN concepts will be built in an open and containerised manner like open RAN, but with the addition of accelerated computing that GPUs bring to network processing workloads.

The centre will also use the newly announced Nvidia AI Aerial platform, which is a suite of computing software and hardware for designing, simulating, training, and deploying AI-RAN on wireless networks.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added: “AI will reinvent the wireless communication network and industry” by “going beyond voice, data, and video to support a wide range of new applications like generative AI and robotics”.

The partnership was announced during T-Mobile’s investor conference held yesterday, when it also revealed an AI data partnership with OpenAI.