Indonesian telco Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison said on Wednesday it has signed a MoU with Nokia and Nvidia at Mobile World Congress 2025 to deploy AI-RAN infrastructure in Indosat’s network.
The deal will see Indosat integrate Nokia's 5G Cloud RAN solution and Nvidia’a AI Aerial platform to create a unified accelerated computing infrastructure for hosting both AI and RAN workloads.
Under the terms of the MoU, Indosat, Nokia and Nvidia will develop, test and deploy the AI-RAN solution, with an initial focus on bringing AI inferencing workloads on Nvidia AI Aerial, followed by the integration of RAN workloads on the same platform.
In addition to delivering gains in network performance, spectral efficiency, and energy consumption, AI-RAN will also lay the groundwork for an eventual software upgrade to 6G, Indosat said.
Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, added that AI-RAN will enable Indosat to share infrastructure costs across multiple applications, and maximize its return on investment while unlocking new revenue streams via AI-driven services.
“When you combine AI with RAN, you create an engine for future innovation,” Uitto, said ina joint statement. “With our 5G Cloud RAN platform, Indosat can transform its network into a multi-purpose computing grid that leverages the synergies of AI-accelerated computing.”
The three companies will kick off the project by establishing a 5G AI-RAN lab in Surabaya in early 2025 for joint development, testing and validation. Indosat plans to launch a small-scale commercial pilot of AI Inferencing workloads running on NVIDIA AI-RAN infrastructure in the second half of this year, with further expansion of the solution deployment slated for 2026.
Indosat president director and CEO Vikram Sinha said the deal makes it the first operator in Southeast Asia and the third globally to build a commercial AI-RAN network.
“By embedding AI into our radio access network, we’re not just enhancing connectivity – we’re building a nationwide AI-powered ecosystem that will fuel innovation across industries,” he said in a statement.
As part of the same initiative, Indosat, Nokia, and NVIDIA will also work with Indonesian universities and research institutions to drive AI-RAN development by supporting academic programs to foster AI innovation in telecom applications and accelerate breakthroughs in AI-driven network optimization, spectral efficiency, and energy consumption.
The deal marks the latest AI-based collaboration with Indosat and Nvidia, who signed an MoU at last year’s MWC to collaborate on establishing Indonesia as a leading player in the AI sector. The MoU included plans for Indosat’s ICT arm Lintasarta to launch a GPUaaS offering called GPU Merdaka, which was unveiled in August 2024.
It’s also one of a number of AI-RAN announcements at MWC25, perhaps a key one being Ericsson and Japanese telco SoftBank – who formed the AI-RAN Alliance at last year’s MWC – reporting their progress in developing AI-RAN.
Among other things, Ericsson and Softbank said they have demonstrated a prototype of Ericsson Cloud RAN software running on the Grace CPU of Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, and defined an architecture to enable orchestration of both RAN and AI applications on the same infrastructure.
The two companies signed an MoU on Monday to expand their research to explore the feasibility of offloading selected RAN functions to the GPU using the Grace Hopper platform. Ericsson and Softbank will also prototype the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads by coordinating SoftBank’s orchestrator from their AITRAS solution and Ericsson’s open network management and automation platform, and explore ways to use AI for robotic applications using Ericsson’s compute offloading framework.
