SoftBank’s latest whitepaper, AI-RAN: Telecom Infrastructure for the Age of AI, lays out a comprehensive vision for reimagining telecom networks with artificial intelligence at their core. The company introduces AITRAS, a platform that integrates RAN and AI workloads on a unified GPU-based infrastructure, backed by NVIDIA Grace Hopper chips.
More than just incremental progress, this whitepaper positions AI-RAN as a turning point in the evolution of mobile infrastructure—from static, hardware-driven networks to computing-centric, software-defined systems that run both connectivity and AI services side by side.
The gRAN (GPU-RAN) architecture enables parallel processing of complex RAN tasks and AI inferencing on the same system. With use cases ranging from real-time robotics and autonomous driving to AI-native customer service, SoftBank argues that AI-RAN is not only a performance booster but also a strategic asset. 
Critically, the paper addresses sustainability and cost: real-world testing in urban Japan shows power usage on par with existing RAN systems, while unlocking new monetization models like Edge AI-as-a-Service. SoftBank forecasts a 33% ROI over five years in a “RAN-heavy” configuration, with even greater upside if AI workloads dominate.
Why It Matters:
As mobile data traffic and AI workloads surge, telecom operators face unsustainable CAPEX burdens. AI-RAN offers a way to repurpose base stations into multi-tenant, revenue-generating compute hubs, opening a path to economic sustainability in the 6G era.
Questions to Ask:
- Can operators realistically adopt GPU-based architectures at scale, given energy and cost considerations?
- Will AI-RAN architectures like AITRAS achieve sufficient vendor interoperability and standardization?
- How will spectrum efficiency and latency-sensitive use cases benefit—or suffer—from co-located AI workloads?
As global RAN strategies evolve, SoftBank’s whitepaper is a timely contribution to a bigger conversation: can telecom embrace AI not just as a tool, but as a fundamental design principle?
