Overview
- Nokia said Wednesday that multiple operators across North America, Europe, Asia‑Pacific and the Middle East have moved its anyRAN software from early evaluations into active laboratory programs and live field trials.
- The company is pairing anyRAN with NVIDIA’s Aerial RAN compute to run AI workloads at the network edge and reported more than 20% spectral efficiency gains from testing while noting those performance figures are company‑reported and need longer trials for independent validation.
- Analyst and market reactions followed the announcement with Rosenblatt initiating coverage with a Buy and $15 target, S&P raising Nokia’s outlook, and shares jumping roughly 5–6% in pre‑market trading.
- Nokia disclosed a €2.8bn AI and Cloud order backlog with about half expected to convert to revenue within 12 months and said it is scaling U.S. manufacturing capacity with a San Jose fab due Q4 2026, a major Pennsylvania test/pack expansion starting Q3 2026, and a new Indium Phosphide fab at NXP’s Chandler site.
- The shift toward software‑defined, GPU‑accelerated RAN aims to let operators push more data through existing spectrum and support distributed AI at the edge, with pilots expected in late 2026 and broader commercial availability targeted for 2027 according to company reporting.