Ericsson, SoftBank Corp. achieve milestones in AI-RAN integration joint research and development

Since the start of the collaboration, Ericsson and SoftBank have successfully made progress in several key areas, demonstrating the potential of AI-RAN integration to transform telecommunications. Achievements include:

• Demonstrating a prototype of Ericsson Cloud RAN software running on the Grace CPU of NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.
• Defining an architecture that enables the orchestration of both RAN and AI applications on the same infrastructure.

Building upon the successful progress of the collaboration, the two companies have agreed to expand their research:

• Exploring the feasibility of offloading selected RAN functions to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) using NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform.
• Prototyping the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads, which can be achieved coordinating SoftBank’s orchestrator from their AITRAS*¹ solution and Ericsson’s open network management and automation platform
• Exploring optimal AI placement of computation for robotic applications using Ericsson’s compute offloading framework

With the expansion of this joint research, it is anticipated that the coordination of SoftBank’s and Ericsson’s development efforts will lead to significant advancements in RAN and mobile networks, as well as in the robotics industry.

Jawad Manssour, President and Representative Director, Ericsson Japan says: “The progress made in our collaboration with SoftBank underscores our commitment to pioneering innovations in telecommunications. These achievements mark significant milestones in our journey to empower communications service providers with more efficient and versatile networks.”

Hideyuki Tsukuda, Executive Vice President and CTO at SoftBank Corp., says: “Building on our previous activities, this expansion into joint research and development between SoftBank and Ericsson toward future network deployment represents an important step forward in the evolution of AI-RAN technology. We will build SoftBank’s infrastructure with AI-RAN and evolve it into next-generation communication infrastructure that supports AI.”

Ericsson and SoftBank are among the prominent industry leaders who formed the AI-RAN Alliance, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024. This alliance is a new collaborative effort to integrate AI into cellular technology, with the goal of progressing RAN technology and mobile networks.

*¹ For details on the orchestrator, refer to the press release dated November 13, 2024, titled ’SoftBank Corp. Develops Orchestrator to Operate AI and vRAN on the Same Virtualized Infrastructure’.

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Industry Leaders in AI and Wireless Form AI-RAN Alliance – AI-RAN Alliance

ABOUT SOFTBANK CORP.
Guided by the SoftBank Group’s corporate philosophy, “Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone,” SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) operates telecommunications and IT businesses in Japan and globally. Building on its strong business foundation, SoftBank Corp. is expanding into non-telecom fields in line with its “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy while further growing its telecom business by harnessing the power of 5G/6G, IoT, Digital Twin and Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) solutions, including High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS)-based stratospheric telecommunications. While constructing AI data centers and developing homegrown LLMs specialized for the Japanese language with 1 trillion parameters, SoftBank is integrating AI with radio access networks  (AI-RAN), with the aim of becoming a provider of next-generation social infrastructure. To learn more, please visit https://www.softbank.jp/en/