New bedfellows Nokia and Nvidia have given some fresh energy to the AI-RAN discussion. Nokia’s commitment to using Nvidia GPUs seems to be an endorsement of the AI-on-RAN proposal, but the industry is yet to be convinced. MEC did not take off as planned many moons ago, and likewise, AI compute at the edge will not be embraced by the industry. Nvidia is buying a 2.9% stake in Nokia for $1 billion investment, and the pair are making it easier to integrate their technologies. Nokia says it is redesigning its RAN software to be compatible with Nvidia’s compute unified device architecture (CUDA) platform. This means that Nokia will build an AI-RAN base station that will run all processing on the…