NEWS
Nokia and SoftBank Corp. to conduct commercial AI-RAN field trial in Japan
Nokia has announced an agreement with SoftBank Corp. to conduct a commercial AI-RAN field trial in Japan in 2027. The planned deployment will use Nokia’ s anyRAN software on SoftBank’ s AITRAS, its core platform for AI-RAN, with NVIDIA Aerial RAN Computer( ARC), in conjunction with the AITRAS Orchestrator. The companies plan to validate AI- RAN technology in a commercial network environment under commercial traffic conditions.
The upcoming field trial will assess key AI-RAN capabilities in a live commercial network environment and represents an important step in SoftBank’ s efforts to commercialise AI-RAN. It will also advance Nokia’ s AI-RAN commercialisation roadmap by moving the technology from laboratory development towards real-world deployment.
The planned trial will combine Nokia’ s AI-native anyRAN Cloud RAN software on a SoftBank AITRAS platform with NVIDIA’ s ARC platform and the AITRAS Orchestrator. The accelerated computing platform incorporates an NVIDIA Grace CPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 GPU and NVIDIA ConnectX-8 networking, providing the computing and high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity needed to run commercial RAN workloads on cloudnative infrastructure.
The AITRAS Orchestrator will support the orchestration of AI and RAN workloads within the trial environment, while NVIDIA’ s programmable accelerated computing platform and NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem provide a software-defined foundation for continued AI-RAN innovation and an evolution path towards AI-native 6G. The trial will also demonstrate how Nokia’ s AI-native anyRAN software can operate within the SoftBank AITRAS platform architecture, highlighting deployment flexibility beyond traditional RAN implementations.
The trial will contribute to the broader industry transition towards AI-native network architectures and explore how operators can introduce new capabilities faster while supporting emerging AI applications at the network edge.
CBRE expands critical infrastructure capabilities in Europe and APAC with Onnec acquisition
CBRE has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Onnec Group Limited, a leading provider of data centre infrastructure services for the world’ s largest technology companies in Europe and Asia Pacific. The acquisition will significantly enhance CBRE’ s ability to support its clients’ data centre needs on a global basis.
The initial purchase price is £ 460 million( approximately US $ 610 million) in cash. In addition, the parties have agreed to a multi-year earnout of up to £ 300 million( approximately US $ 400 million), subject to Onnec meeting certain growth thresholds. Onnec is expected to generate approximately £ 370 million( US $ 498 million) in revenue and more than £ 50 million( US $ 67 million) of core EBITDA in 2027 and be immediately accretive to CBRE’ s core earnings per share. business. CBRE expects this business line to generate nearly US $ 4.5 billion of total revenue in 2027, including contributions from Onnec. The rest of CBRE’ s services businesses, most notably Project Management and Advisory Services, are expected to generate almost US $ 2.5 billion of infrastructure services revenue in 2027, resulting in total estimated 2027 infrastructure services revenue of nearly US $ 7.0 billion. This does not include
revenue from periodic data centre land sales in the development business.
Onnec specialises in the design, deployment and maintenance of network, fibre and data centre infrastructure. The company’ s approximately 800 employees serve hyperscalers across key markets in the UK, Continental Europe and Asia Pacific. Onnec’ s geographic presence aligns well with the data centre infrastructure services that CBRE delivers in the US.
Onnec will operate as part of CBRE’ s Critical Infrastructure Services line of
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