By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-06-08 09:30:00
Long before the current AI boom, Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) were barely known outside the computer games industry. Their ability to do parallel processing – multiple calculations at once – later captured the interest of AI’s developers, transforming Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company. These days, CEO Jensen Huang seems determined to insert his chips into everything. A PC chip, codeveloped with Taiwan’s MediaTek, is promised this year. There are GPUs for cars, GPUs for robots, even GPUs for turning a home into a mini data center. And as part of this GPU colonization, Nvidia is working on a chip for the 6G radio.
The move, confirmed by Nvidia to Light Reading, marks a dramatic new development in the GPU giant’s “AI-RAN” strategy. Previously, it had demonstrated how Grace Hopper, a superchip combining an ordinary central processing unit or CPU (the Grace part) with a more powerful GPU (Hopper), could replace the custom silicon in a radio access network (or RAN). Grace Hopper and related products would take over the RAN compute that happens in appliances or servers, commonly referred to as central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs) by the industry. This left the antenna-hosting radio unit (RU) clamped to a mast or sited on a rooftop – the other half of the RAN equation.
Unlike the CUs and DUs, those RUs have not formerly been a target for Nvidia or the makers of general-purpose processors. Years before Nvidia waded into the RAN, Intel had…
