BARCELONA, Spain — March 4, 2025

As Mobile World Congress 2025 enters its second day at Fira Barcelona, two American chip giants — Nvidia and Qualcomm — are emerging as the most consequential players reshaping the future of telecommunications infrastructure. With more than 109,000 attendees from 205 countries converging on the Spanish city, the show floor is less about flashy handsets this year and more about who will supply the brains behind next-generation networks.

Nvidia marked the one-year anniversary of the AI-RAN Alliance, the industry group it co-founded with SoftBank, which has now grown to 75 member organizations spanning 17 countries — including 43 technology companies, 15 academic institutions, and seven service providers. The alliance, which also counts Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and T-Mobile among its founding members, is pushing to embed AI directly into radio access networks (RAN), enabling real-time network optimization and opening new revenue streams for operators. At Nokia's pre-show event, SoftBank's VP of Advanced Technology Ryuji Wakikawa underscored the commercial logic: "Training is an investment. But for operators, the real revenue comes from inference. That's why we need AI-RAN." SoftBank demonstrated its AI-RAN system, dubbed AITRAS, running on Nvidia's Grace Hopper 200 GPU server — combining virtualized RAN and AI workloads on a single platform.

Qualcomm, meanwhile, made one of the biggest branding moves of MWC 2025 by unveiling Dragonwing, a new product line dedicated to enterprise and industrial markets, sitting alongside its long-standing Snapdragon consumer brand. Dragonwing covers industrial IoT, networking infrastructure, and cellular infrastructure — signaling Qualcomm's intent to deepen its foothold in the B2B telecom space. On the network side, Qualcomm and Ericsson announced a successful interoperability test on a 5G frequency band designed for European railway communications, a critical milestone toward the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS). In a separate announcement, Qualcomm's Dragonwing RAN Automation Suite was confirmed as commercially live within Verizon's network via Samsung Networks, delivering an average energy saving of 15%.

The AI infrastructure competition is drawing in software players as well. ServiceNow launched a suite of telecom-specific AI agents built on Nvidia AI Enterprise software, targeting automation of customer service, maintenance, and fraud detection for communications service providers.

With chip companies aggressively entering telecom's network operations and inference markets, the supply chain dynamics of the industry are shifting faster than many operators anticipated.

gzgi@skylife.co.kr