This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona focused heavily on AI and the role this technology will play in the future of mobile networks.

Mobile vendors, such as Nokia and Ericsson, bigged up the significance that AI will have in these networks, while network carriers also outlined how AI is already playing a role in monitoring traffic.

Central to the telecoms AI revolution is, of course, GPU giant Nvidia. The world's richest company has seen its value rocket on the back of sales of AI chips to the hyperscalers and the wider data center industry.

Valued at more than $4 trillion, the company is not standing still, and its annual GTC developer conference kicks off in California this week, it has grand designs to support telcos navigate the transition to AI networks.

At MWC 2026, Nvidia’s influence was seen regularly across the showfloor on the booths of its customers, spanning telcos, vendors, cloud providers, hyperscalers, and more.

"Our goal in the telecom industry now is to build highly optimized base stations, 5G base stations, and 6G going forward that will be AI-native and fully software defined," Soma Velayutham, general manager for AI and telecoms at Nvidia, tells DCD.

He says the company's role in telecoms is to build the vertical stack for the industry, while leveraging Nvidia’s compute power.

Re-inventing the RAN

Nvidia’s focus on Radio Access Networks (RAN) has formed a large part of the company’s telco push, with a focus on AI RAN, which integrates AI into 5G and 6G radio networks.

The need for wireless networks to support AI traffic and new Edge AI applications has got Nvidia very interested for a couple of key reasons, says Velayutham.

“Operators spend somewhere, depending on the size, between $1 and $5 billion a year in terms of Capex, some potentially even more,” notes Velayutham. “RAN is actually designed for peak, because it's like a power grid, you have to design for peak. And if you design for peak, by definition, you're underutilized.”

What's more, he says that telcos are likely only utilizing that peak for one hour of the day. This means that, despite investing billions of dollars each year, the return on the asset for these telcos is around 30 to 40 percent.

According to Velayutham, AI RAN will provide telcos with an opportunity to take better control of their networks and use their assets by having greater visibility of network resources.

He suggests that the technology is an opportunity for the industry as a whole to rewrite RAN algorithms, some of which are 50 years old and designed for the cellular technology of the day.

Velayutham says: “AI can do a very good job in running the RAN workload itself. We call it AI for RAN, and this can help improve the spectral efficiency of the RAN and make this asset a lot more efficient.

“We want to build the cheapest plane they can build, and we also want to make sure that it's highly utilized."

As such, Nvidia has paired with network vendor Nokia and US carrier T-Mobile to carry out GPU-accelerated AI-RAN workloads at T-Mobile’s AI-RAN innovation center at T-Mobile's Seattle headquarters.

The company has also worked with Indonesia's Indosat and Japanese carrier SoftBank to conduct similar trials.

Nokia investment

As Velayutham points out, Nvidia has had its eye on the telecoms sector since long before the AI boom.

“We started this journey eight years ago, and the very first public announcement we made was 2019 MWC in LA,” Velayutham explains.

Although Nvidia’s prominence among telcos hasn’t always been headline news, the company’s focus has intensified in more recent years, especially as AI has taken off.

Last October, Nvidia made headlines when the company invested $1 billion into Finnish vendor Nokia. While the sum might be pocket change to Nvidia, the investment enabled it to take a three percent stake in Nokia.

As part of the agreement, the two companies are working together on incorporating AI into telecom networks and data center infrastructure.

"Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure, the digital nervous system of our economy and security," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, Nvidia, stated at the time.

Nokia sees the jump from 5G to 6G as a fundamental redesign of the mobile network. This is where Nvidia is able to come into play, says Velayutham.

“Operators want to use our hardware platform, but they want to buy their software features from trusted vendors, such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung,” he tells DCD. “They want to buy RAN from Nokia and are not interested in others, so bringing them onto our platform makes a lot of sense.”

Velayutham is keen to point out that the company isn’t exclusively working with Nokia, but also works with other vendors, including the aforementioned Ericsson and Samsung.

Nvidia's 6G bet

Further emphasizing Nvidia’s telco play, the tech giant made a host of announcements during MWC a fortnight ago. One of the most notable ones was the formation of a tech alliance that focuses on building out an open-source 6G.

6G, which is largely expected to be AI-native, is tipped to enable billions of autonomous machines, vehicles, sensors, and robots, and significantly increasing demands for security and trust.

Although the technology is not expected to launch until the latter part of this decade, the telecoms industry is already looking forward to this, including Nvidia.

“AI is redefining computing and driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history - and telecommunications is next,” noted Huang.

“Together with a global coalition of industry leaders, Nvidia is building AI-RAN to transform the world’s telecom networks into AI infrastructure everywhere.”

While the standards of 6G are still to be defined, it’s highly likely that Nvidia will play a key role in the next generation of cellular networks. The industry will be closely watching GTC this week to see what Huang's company has in store for telcos.

This week, DCD and our sister publication SDxCentral will be reporting live at GTC, delivering updates on the show.