NVIDIA GPUs to Power Nokia's Next-Generation 6G Networks

Summary

Nokia has announced the availability of its first NVIDIA-based radio access network (RAN) products, marking a major strategic pivot following a $1 billion investment from NVIDIA in late 2025. The Finnish telecom vendor claims these GPU-powered systems will be upgradeable throughout the 5G-to-6G transition, eliminating the traditional hardware refresh cycle that has forced carriers to replace custom silicon every 3–5 years.

The partnership represents a fundamental shift in how Nokia approaches network infrastructure, replacing Marvell-based custom silicon with NVIDIA's graphics processing units as the foundation for future radio access products. Nokia executives argue that NVIDIA's GPU architecture provides the computational flexibility and longevity that custom silicon cannot offer, enabling a single hardware platform to support multiple generations of mobile technology.

This move sets up a direct competitive confrontation with rival Ericsson, which remains committed to custom silicon and offers alternative virtual RAN software designed to run on Intel or other CPUs. While Ericsson executives have raised concerns about vendor lock-in through NVIDIA's CUDA software platform, Nokia has implemented hardware abstraction layers to minimize dependency and enable Layer 2+ software to run on multiple processor architectures.

• The partnership intensifies competition with Ericsson, which maintains its custom silicon strategy and warns of vendor lock-in risks
• Nokia has implemented hardware abstraction layers to keep Layer 2+ software platform-agnostic across x86, Arm, and other architectures