- The AI-RAN Alliance is celebrating its first-year anniversary at MWC 2025
- The organization’s launch was heavily centered around Nvidia’s chipsets and systems, prompting questions about whether a rival gang will emerge
- One analyst told Fierce that he thinks Qualcomm should start a group that offers an alternative
The AI-RAN Alliance is celebrating its one-year anniversary at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona next week, but its heavy bent toward chip powerhouse Nvidia has some wondering if a rival organization will emerge.
To be sure, the alliance has grown significantly since its debut at MWC last year. The organization on Thursday announced that it now has 75 members spanning 17 countries around the world. Spearheaded by SoftBank and Nvidia, the group’s initial founders include Arm, DeepSig, Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft, Northeastern University, Samsung Electronics and T-Mobile.
Part of the idea is to use AI to make radios work more efficiently, improving spectral efficiency and energy efficiency, as well as powering new revenue-generating applications for operators. The AI-RAN Alliance has 10 demos planned throughout MWC 2025, covering everything from AI-RAN orchestration to integrated sensing for safer pedestrian crossings.
But the overall effort is still missing some key players, including U.S. carriers AT&T and Verizon and chipset giant Intel. Qualcomm was not a member initially, but it has since quietly joined the initiative.
All of this is spurring conjecture that an alternative alliance could be in the offing. Granted, the AI-RAN Alliance says it’s open to all, but the dominance of Nvidia is disconcerting to some observers.
ABI Research analyst Malik Saadi said he expects an alternative group will launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.
“I am pretty convinced that there will be some announcements related to some new alliances,” he told Fierce. “For me, it does not make sense for Nvidia to highjack the whole AI RAN, and obviously, if that happens, the other vendors will be left behind. I think Nvidia is doing what they’re doing because they’re pushing their GPU as a service.”
Nvidia’s dominance in the AI-RAN Alliance could be seen as reducing the ability of other chipset companies to influence how the technology evolves, Saadi said. Even though it might result in further fragmentation, he thinks Qualcomm should pursue alternative industry collaborations to the AI-RAN Alliance – and do so before it’s too late.
Other chipset suppliers could come together – along with other players – to create an alliance that is “truly open” where they can all “share the cake,” he said. In fact, he will be disappointed if they do not establish such an alternative organization.
Qualcomm’s role is of interest in part because it is one of the biggest contributors to the 3GPP standards process. While the AI-RAN Alliance is not a standards organization, it plans to provide recommendations to the standards bodies.
For the record, a Qualcomm spokesperson told Fierce that it has no intention of starting its own alliance. And in an interview Wednesday, Qualcomm SVP of Engineering John Smee didn’t sound like there was any new organization in the offing.
He likened Qualcomm’s role in the AI-RAN Alliance as something akin to how it participates in the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA). Like the AI-RAN Alliance, the 5GAA is not a standards body but a group of cross-industry companies working together to develop solutions for future mobility and transportation services.
It’s useful for Qualcomm to participate and “share notes” rather than have every single vendor separately bring input to a standards body, Smee said.
Other U.S. operators
T-Mobile is a founding member of the AI-RAN Alliance, but AT&T and Verizon have not joined.
“AT&T is selective in choosing what industry groups we join based on the needs of the business,” an AT&T spokeswoman told Fierce.
Verizon will continue evaluating the situation. “While we appreciate the work of the AI-RAN Alliance and have been in contact with their leadership, at this time, Verizon is focusing its efforts and resources on our existing VCP, v-RAN and related AI initiatives,” a Verizon spokesperson told Fierce. “We are also actively engaged in key standards organizations such as 3GPP, where we believe significant progress is being made in driving the architectural framework for AI-RAN through 5G-Advanced and MEC capabilities.”
Need for speed
AI-RAN Alliance Chair Alex Jinsung Choi, principal fellow of SoftBank’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology, told reporters during a media briefing this week that seven telecom operators are on board, and there are about 50 more companies in the membership pipeline. The group is well on its way to have more than 120 members.
“This kind of scale is crucial because AI-driven transformation in telecom is not something that one company, not even a handful of companies, can do alone,” he said.
It’s also critical that they move fast, he said. “AI is moving at an incredible pace while telecom networks have traditionally been built on long structured standardization cycles,” such as 10-year cycles, he said. “Our mission is to bridge these two worlds” and translate the two different languages to push the best of AI innovation into telecom.
Chetan Sharma, founder of Chetan Sharma Consulting, said the AI-RAN alliance is trying to accelerate the adoption and technical progress of AI in the telecom space and it’s as good a place as any to get the job done.
“The standards-based process is going to take time but an alliance like AI-RAN can prove to be an important catalyst in getting industry alignment around best practices, datasets, research and all this will feed into the standardization process through the member companies,” Sharma told Fierce. “While Nvidia got the alliance started, I think because there are so many other key ecosystem players involved including the operators, the alliance can see meaningful progress on a software-scale rather than 3GPP-timeline.”
Other companies might form a new alliance if they see gaps or misalignment with their interests. “However, operators and companies have limited resources and bandwidth and can’t really participate in multiple such alliances. So, if the momentum continues, more companies are likely to join them rather than form something else,” he concluded.
This story was updated with additional comment from Qualcomm.