AI Meets RAN: Inside Ericsson and SoftBank’s Groundbreaking Partnership
TOKYO, JAPAN, 3rd MARCH, 2025 – Ericsson and SoftBank Corp. have made important progress in their joint research and development efforts towards incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Radio Access Networks (RAN) technology.
Amongst the many collaborations, a prominent achievement is the successful demonstration of Cloud RAN software, which can operate on NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.
Furthermore, the partnership has developed an architecture that allows RAN and AI applications to be orchestrated over a shared infrastructure.
To take advantage of these milestones, the companies are broadening their research scope to determine the possibility of offloading certain RAN workloads to a Graphics Processing Unit GPU using the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper platform.
They also intend to begin prototyping the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads by orchestrating SoftBank’s AITRAS solution with the Ericsson open network management and automation platform. In addition, the collaboration will seek to identify the best location for AI in robotics applications using Ericson’s compute offloading framework.
Jawad Manssour, the President and Representative Director of Ericsson Japan, said,
“The achievements made with SoftBank show our determination in new innovations in telecommunications. These are key steps in the journey to provide communications service providers with more efficient and flexible networks.”
SoftBank Corp. Executive Vice President and CTO, Hideyuki Tsukuda added,
“Building on these previous activities, the expansion into joint research and development between SoftBank and Ericsson toward future network deployment is an important step in the advancement of AI-RAN technology. We will build SoftBank’s infrastructure that utilizes AI-RAN and integrate it into the next generation of communication infrastructure that supports AI.”
It is believed that these changes will have a positive influence not only on RAN and mobile networks, but also on the robotics field.
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