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.