Nvidia has detailed plans to support the build out of 6G on an open source platform, as the tech giant announced the "commitment" along with several top telecoms companies.

Along with Booz Allen, BT Group, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, MITRE, Nokia, OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, ODC, SK Telecom, SoftBank Corp. and T-Mobile, Nvidia said it aims to "build the world’s next generation of wireless networks on AI-native, open, secure, and trustworthy platforms."

According to Nvidia, the announcement is part of a shared responsibility to ensure 6G infrastructure is open, intelligent, resilient, and accelerates innovation and safeguards global trust.

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.

The company also said that this latest alliance, of which there are many, "complements" Nvidia's existing partnerships with industry and governments across Europe, Japan, Korea, the UK, and the US.

"AI is redefining computing and driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history — and telecommunications is next,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Together with a global coalition of industry leaders, Nvidia is building AI-RAN to transform the world’s telecom networks into AI infrastructure everywhere.”

To support this shift from 5G, which came before the AI boom arrived, Nvidia said its technology will help bring telcos closer to these AI-native networks.

The company plans to embed AI across the RAN, Edge, and core of these 6G networks, which it notes will help support secure integrated sensing and communications, intelligence, and decision-making while supporting interoperability, supply-chain resilience, and faster innovation.

Reflecting on Nvidia's alliance with the telcos around open source 6G during Nokia's Day Zero event on Sunday (March 1), Ronnie Vasishta, senior vice president of telecommunications, Nvidia, said the aim of the commitment is to be "open" from the outset.

Nvidia also joins the Linux Foundation's OCUDU

On the same day, Nvidia was also named as one of the general members of another open source group, OCUDU (Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit).

OCUDU, which has roots in the US Department of Defense (DoD) aims to accelerate work on streamlining AI efforts to benefit 6G technology development.

Partners in this newly launched Linux Foundation group include AMD, AT&T, DeepSig, Ericsson, Nokia, Nvidia, SoftBank, SRS, and Verizon. In total, there are 21 general members and 17 research institutions.

The initiative was started with investment from the National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) and the FutureG Office, which awarded funds to AI Native wireless company DeepSig and Software Radio Systems (SRS) to build the initial software for OCUDU.

The Telcos, cloud providers, equipment vendors, and research institutions that make up the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation will work to co-develop and integrate critical components required for 5G and early 6G deployments.

“By aligning global efforts under the Linux Foundation, we’re building an open, trusted, and secure open source platform to power the next decade of wireless innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, Edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation.

“The OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation represents a key step forward in open source RAN, specifically for CU and DU.”