Nokia’s showcases at Mobile World Congress 2026 saw the network giant double down on AI-augmented radio access network (AI-RAN) efforts, revealing new additions to its AirScale portfolio and results of successful field tests with Nvidia.

Among offerings unveiled at the world’s largest connectivity conference was the launch of its Doksui line of remote radio heads (RRHs). The Finnish firm said its new radios are “engineered to meet the performance, sustainability, and automation demands of the AI era.”

Doksuri, which takes its name from the Korean word for an eagle or large bird of prey, is powered by Nokia’s ReefShark system on chip (SoC) and power processing directly at the edge for 5G and future 6G networks.

Nokia claims the new “foundational component” of its AI-RAN efforts offers up to 30% improvement in power efficiency and reduces site footprint with Doksuri radios being 25% lighter than prior systems. They’re also designed to be simple to install, with their unique mounting system believed to reduce installation time by up to 70%.

“Our next-generation radio portfolio brings advanced processing closer to the edge, enabling operators to meet rising AI-driven traffic demands while reducing energy consumption and total cost of ownership,” Pallavi Mahajan, chief technology and AI officer at Nokia, explained. “By embedding AI-ready capabilities directly into the radio layer, we are helping telcos build sustainable, high-performance networks ready for the next wave of 5G and the evolution toward 6G.”

AI-RAN momentum & key carrier trials

Alongside its growing efforts in the data center space, AI-RAN has quickly become a core focus of Nokia, and its strong presence at MWC this year continued to reflect that priority.

Its AI-induced endeavors received a serious boost last October with a $1 billion investment from Nvidia to fuel Nokia's AI-RAN efforts.

Nokia’s MWC 2026 showcase marked the next step in its relationship as it detailed momentum with partners in this space, including new customer integrations and successful functional tests.

“AI is the new workload reshaping networks. That shift requires architectural change across every layer, including the radio,” Nokia CEO Justin Hotard noted. “AI-RAN transforms RAN into a software-driven platform optimized for AI, and with Nvidia and a growing ecosystem of partners, we are progressing from validation to commercial deployment.”

Among the operators Nokia offered up for showcase at MWC was T-Mobile US, with the carrier believed to have successfully tested GPU-accelerated AI-RAN workloads at its AI-RAN Innovation Center at the carrier's Seattle headquarters.

The trial demonstrated concurrent AI and RAN processing on a single Nvidia Grace Hopper 200 server using accelerated AI-RAN workloads, with Nokia’s AirScale multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radio operating in the 3.7 GHz band to support use cases like video streaming, generative AI queries, and AI-based video captioning.

Southeast Asian carrier Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) was also up for Nokia display at MWC, having trialed Nokia’s Nvidia-augmented AI-RAN offerings. The carrier’s network utilized Nokia’s AirScale RRHs and RAN software running on Nvidia GPUs to power an AI RAN–powered layer-three 5G call, an apparent regional first.

SoftBank was also in Nokia’s AI-RAN spotlight, with the pair having trialed using spare AI-RAN compute capacity to fuel third-party AI tasks. The partnership comes as SoftBank has been aggressively making strides in the nascent AI-RAN space, culminating in a close partnership with ally Nvidia on projects including applying AI to its 5G networks and the creation of its AITRAS solution to support edge AI applications.

Beyond the aforementioned trio, Nokia revealed its expanding ecosystem of AI-RAN partners, building servers and infrastructure solutions to power AI-RAN, adding the likes of Quanta and Supermicro, who join Dell Technologies.

Nokia’s ecosystem partners utilize Red Hat OpenShift for orchestration, which acts as a common cloud-native platform to scale Nvidia-accelerated RAN and AI workloads across hybrid clouds.

“By providing a common, cloud-native foundation powered by Red Hat OpenShift, we are enabling service providers to unify their network and AI applications on a single platform,” Red Hat CTO Chris Wright explained. “This consistency is essential for a faster ROI and accelerating the delivery of AI-native 6G, giving our customers the flexibility to deploy and scale intelligent services from the core to the edge with full control over their technology stack.”