By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 08:30:00
The deal Nokia struck with Nvidia last October had the nature of a Faustian pact to its harshest critics. Enter the Mephistopheles of Nvidia, promising worldly riches in exchange for the Finnish chipmaker’s soul. Nokia duly accepted a $1 billion investment and watched its share price gain value. But Nvidia became its second-biggest shareholder, with unorthodox influence over Nokia’s technology strategy. As a condition of the deal, future 5G and 6G network software will be designed to work on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips normally associated with AI. Ericsson, Nokia’s big Nordic rival, seems unlikely to follow.
Agnosticism to underlying hardware is Ericsson’s preference. In 2023, before Nvidia came along, Nokia began talking up an approach dubbed “anyRAN,” allowing its radio access network software to be used with any cloud and server infrastructure. Ericsson’s equivalent could be called “anychip.” Its apparent goal, made clear on Ericsson’s latest earnings call last week, is to avoid extreme reliance on one silicon platform and instead ensure the same network software is deployable on a variety of different chips.
“We selected a strategy several years ago to basically disaggregate the software and hardware and actually allow our software to run on pretty much any architecture,” said Börje Ekholm, Ericsson’s CEO, when asked if there is a role for Nvidia in future RAN products. “Of course, here we can run on x86, but it can run on GPUs, it can run on…
