T-Mobile and Nvidia have announced they are working with Nokia and other partners to deliver physical AI applications over distributed Edge AI networks.

According to the partners, the purpose of the collaboration is to showcase how AI-RAN infrastructure can transform the wireless network into a platform for distributed high-performance Edge AI computing.

Such a move is tipped to lay the foundation for developers to deploy vision AI agents that understand the physical world across cities, utilities, and industrial worksites using Nvidia's Metropolis platform.

It builds on T-Mobile's recent US pilot of Nvidia's AI RAN infrastructure and Nokia's anyRAN software. The carrier is now working with select Nvidia physical AI partners to show how cell sites and mobile switching offices can support distributed Edge AI workloads while continuing to deliver advanced 5G connectivity.

Nvidia's AI-RAN offering includes its Nvidia ARC-Pro, which is built on Nvidia's RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition for power-constrained cell sites, and Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition for higher-capacity mobile switching offices (MSOs).

As part of the agreement, T-Mobile is piloting Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition AI infrastructure to demonstrate physical AI applications at the Edge.

“Telecommunication networks are evolving into the AI infrastructure enabling billions of devices — from vision AI agents to robots and autonomous vehicles — to see, hear, and act in real time,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. “By turning the 5G network into a distributed AI computer with T-Mobile and Nokia, we’re creating a scalable blueprint for the world’s Edge AI infrastructure.”

“Turning networks into distributed AI computing platforms to unlock the full potential of Physical AI will require ultra-low latency and space-time coherency at the network Edge for billions of endpoints, and that’s what we’ve built at T-Mobile,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.

“With the first nationwide 5G Standalone and 5G Advanced network, we are uniquely positioned to help power a future where intelligent systems don’t wait on the cloud but rely on intelligent networks that allow them to act in real time.”

Earlier this month at Mobile World Congress, Nokia, T-Mobile US, and Nvidia tested GPU-accelerated AI-RAN workloads at T-Mobile’s AI-RAN innovation center at T-Mobile's Seattle headquarters.

In T-Mobile’s over-the-air (OTA) lab environment, Nokia’s AirScale Massive MIMO radio operating in the 3.7 GHz (n77) band supported user equipment (UEs) running use cases such as video streaming, generative AI queries, and AI-based video captioning.

Nvidia's grand telco plans

Nvidia has made a point of referring to the mobile network as the nervous system for physical AI to thrive. The company told DCD earlier this month that there's an opportunity to reinvent the Radio Access Network (RAN).

The move to its AI-RAN will address a critical bottleneck in scaling physical AI, notes Nvidia, citing a lack of low-latency, secure, and ubiquitous connectivity.

There's an expectation that the move to autonomous networks will set the basis for AI agents that operate in the physical world, spanning autonomous vehicles, robots, sensors, and more.

Nvidia notes that T-Mobile's 5G Standalone network can provide the wide-area coverage and guaranteed quality of service required for complex AI agents to operate in busy city intersections, industrial facilities, and rural areas. This architecture enables physical AI to offload heavy computation from the device to the nearest Edge location, something that wouldn't be possible via a centralized cloud.

Several physical AI developers, including Fogsphere, LinkerVision, Levatas, Vaidio, and Siemens Energy, are integrating AI agents on top of Nvidia's Metropolis to deploy use cases across smart cities, industrial facilities, and utilities.

T-Mobile and Nvidia's collaboration comes as the latter hosts its annual GTC event in San Jose, California, this week. During the event, Nvidia CEO Huang said that demand for its products through 2027 has hit the $1 trillion mark, as covered by DCD yesterday.